Panics could be a safe way to handle faults at runtime. To me, "Unsafe operations" are more like ones that continue executing in a comprimised state, such as a

Panics could be a safe way to handle faults at runtime. To me, "Unsafe operations" are more like ones that continue executing in a comprimised state, such as a buffer overflow, or that crash incompletely, segfault, locking up resources in a live lock, etc. Bailing and freeing all your resources seems harder to exploit and sometimes the only sane response.