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> Some of these don't strike me as particularly pragmatic. E.g. are overflow checks really that expensive

Did you read the article? Rust includes overflow checks in debug builds, and then about a dozen methods (checked_mul, checked_add, etc.) which explicitly provide for checks in release builds.

Pragmatism, for me, is this help when you need it approach.

TBF Rust forces certain choices on one in other instances, like SipHash as the default Hasher for HashMap. But again opting out, like opting in, isn't hard.




I'd prefer for Rust to opt for correctness/bug-freeness over performance, even in release builds. If you are doing number crunching you should have to opt out of these checks.


> I'd prefer for Rust to opt for correctness/bug-freeness over performance, even in release builds. If you are doing number crunching you should have to opt out of these checks.

You can turn those checks on, in release mode, of course: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/codegen-options/index.html#o...

But I think the behavior on overflow is to "panic!()" (terminate immediately)? So -- I guess from my POV I wouldn't in release mode. I just think that tradeoff isn't generally worth it, but again, you can turn that behavior on.


panics do not terminate immediately; they unwind the stack, and if they’re not caught, they terminate the current thread, not the process.


> panics do not terminate immediately; they unwind the stack, and if they’re not caught, they terminate the current thread, not the process.

I don't disagree though this point is a little pedantic. I suppose the docs also need an update? See: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/macro.panic.html

    "This allows a *program to terminate immediately* and provide feedback to the caller of the program."
Now, I don't think so, because program death is usually what this type of panic means.

And my point remains, without more, this probably isn't the behavior one wants in release mode. But, yes, also perhaps an even better behavior is turning on checks, catching the panic, and logging it with others.


I don't disagree that it could use revising, but it's technically correct: it allows but does not require. If you've configured panic=abort, it will abort the program instead of unwind, but that's not the default.




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