One additional data point: The Rust compiler got ~2% faster when they made some of the core traits in the serializer infallible (ie. panic instead of using Resu

One additional data point: The Rust compiler got ~2% faster when they made some of the core traits in the serializer infallible (ie. panic instead of using Result): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/93066 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/93066 Writeup from the contributor: https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/02/25/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-2022.html https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/02/25/how-to-speed-up-the... > The Decoder trait used for metadata decoding was fallible, using Result throughout. But decoding failures should only happen if something highly unexpected happens (e.g. metadata is corrupted) and on failure the calling code would just abort. This PR changed Decoder to be infallible throughout—panicking immediately instead of panicking slightly later—thus avoiding lots of pointless Result propagation, for wins across many benchmarks of up to 2%.