Programmer Humor

Oh, it can happen when you do calculations with compile-time constants...

But the GP's claim that it's a "frequent" thing is suspect.

(Crashing is also useful when you are writing and-user applications, but you'll probably want .expect like in the meme.)

I don't think that's a valid comparison. The behavior does differ when it comes to cleanly releasing resources. Rust's panic performs the drop actions for the current values on the stack, a SIGILL or SIGSEGV crash doesn't.

#[derive(Debug)]
struct MyStruct {}

impl Drop for MyStruct {
	fn drop(&mut self) {
		println!("{:?}", "imagine cleanup here"); // this is called
	}
}

fn main() {
	let a = MyStruct {};
	panic!("panic!");
        println!("{a:?}");
}

Try it yourself

I was talking more about unwrap causing a panic rather than calling the actual panic macro directly. Rust forces the programmer to deal with bad or ambiguous results, and what that is exactly is entirely decided by the function you are calling. If a function decides to return None when (system timer mod 2 == 0), then you'd better check for None in your code. Edit: otherwise your code is ending now with a panic, as opposed to your code merrily trotting down the path of undefined behaviour and a segfault or similar later on.

Once you get to a point where we are doing the actual panic, well, that is starting to just be semantics.