[antonvs]

The difference is not just convention. You mentioned some similarities between Rust panics and C++ exceptions, but there are some important differences. If you tried to write Rust code that used panics and catch_unwind as a general exception mechanism, you’d soon run into those differences, and find out why Rust code isn’t written that way.

The key difference is that in the general case, panics are designed to lead to program termination, not recovery. Examples like unit tests are a special case - the fact that handling panics work for that case doesn’t mean they would work well more broadly.

The point you mentioned, about being able to configure panics to abort, is another issue. If you did that in a program which used panics as an exception handling mechanism, the program would fail on its first exception. Of course you can say “just don’t do that”, but the point is it highlights the difference in the semantics of panics vs. exceptions.

Also, panics are not typed, the way exceptions are in C++ or Java. Using them as a general exception handling mechanism would either be very limiting, or require the design of a whole infrastructure for that.

The are other issues as well, including behavior related to threads, to FFI, and to where panics can even be caught.