Panics can be caught and handled, though: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html. So

Panics can be caught and handled, though: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html. So it is exactly the right choice in the circumstances. Apps like webservers and other things that need to not terminate the process are expected to be compiled with panic=unwind. Everybody else should compile with panic=abort and sleep safe knowing that if their invariants get corrupted, execution will not continue. Using Result<T, E> - the Rust's rough equivalent to checked exceptions in something like Java - would be the wrong choice here since it effectively forces the client to check and handle invariant violations inside library code - and the client really has no way to handle them other then do the equivalent of 500 Internal Error, so there's no point doing such checks on every call.