[kibwen]

I'm guessing that when the parent says "custom options" they're referring to libraries providing their own customization options via "crate features" (https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/features.html ). Not only do libraries have an incentive to test that their own feature flags work, but also these feature flags avoid combinatorial explosion (and are easier to test) because feature flags must be additive due to how Cargo is designed: every feature flag must function the same even in the presence of any combination of the rest (flags must not be exclusive with each other).

On the other hand, I'm guessing that by "custom flags" you're referring to compiler-level flags that influence codegen, which rustc doesn't have that many of, and most of the ones that rustc does have are for controlling things that people might reasonably expect to be nontrivial work to change in the first place (e.g. linker/symbol options, cross-compilation/platform options, LLVM/gritty optimization/instrumentation options). Of the rustc codegen options that ordinary users might want to play around with, I see only two: one for turning off arithmetic overflow checks (which makes all integers act like their overflowing equivalents from the stdlib), and one for determining the general strategy of what happens when a panic occurs. The latter is unlikely to cause problems because the default behavior is a superset of the configurable behavior, and for the former any silent problems in misconfigured users would manifest as panics for everyone else, so there's a good chance the problem would be fixed upstream regardless.