[oconnor663]

All the filesystem APIs return Results rather than panicking, since like you said it's expected for those to fail sometimes and for the program to handle those failures. It's possible for a library to convert those Results into panics by calling .unwrap() on them, but that would usually be considered a bad design (ok for tests and tiny programs though). So I think you have an important point here, which is that if your application is calling into a library that you worry might have some bad design decisions in it, you do have to worry about it bringing down your process. And maybe it could make sense in some rare cases to try to isolate that library with catch_unwind. But I think most Rust programmers would prefer to just fix the dependency. The fact that you can visibly spot a lot of these conversions in the code is helpful for auditing.

I'm not super up to speed on JS, but I might draw an analogy to Python. Handling a result in Rust is similar to catching an exception of a known type in Python, a very common thing to do. On the other hand, catch_unwind is (loosely) similar to writing a bare except clause that catches every conceivable exception. You can do that, and sometimes it's correct to do that, but in most cases it's a bad idea. You don't want to accidentally suppress errors that indicate a bug in your program.

[simion314]

Thanks, from my experience with desktop apps in managed language I alwas added a global catch for crashes that were not caught or can't be caught, there I was writing the details in a log file. Then I had a menu entry for submitting a bug report, a popup would open and the user had the option to include the log file with the exception information and details like operating system, runtime version etc. The only thing that was bringing down this app in the higher level language(it was an Adobe AIR app in Action Script 3) was the freaking Web View , because was a wrapper over WebKit and that was C++.

This days doing backend dev I am forced to move stuff in a different process but most stuff I use I prefer to use binaries then libraries , for example for resizing an image instead of using the built in image library that crashes sometimes and brings the script down I install image magic on the server and write a script for resizing an image then call that script and check it's output , sometimes I had to use the timeout linux program to kill the program if it gets stuck on some input file.

If I were to create that image resize library in Rust I would attempt to catch everything , including panics and return it as a error result(so only system crashes would be uncaught)