This is completely incorrect with respect to Rust, both historically and practically. Rust started with unwinding, and then grew opt-in abort machinery for those use cases where it matters. And, for what seems like the millionth time, unwinding does not equal exceptions; this is like saying that C has exceptions because of setjmp/longjmp. Unwinding exists in Rust solely to give one the ability to fail gracefully, running destructors that might have valuable side effects and allowing Rust-written subsystems to avoid taking down the entire system. For an example of the latter, Skylight, who ships a Ruby gem written in Rust, "catches" any unwinding so that an errant failure in their gem does not bring down a client's entire Ruby process. I have been writing Rust for years and, without exaggeration or (heh) exception, have never once seen the ability to "catch" unwinding used as a basis for constructing ad-hoc recoverable exception-handling, especially since abort-on-panic is an entirely valid mode for Rust applications (this is how Dropbox's backend Rust is compiled, for example) and completely obviates any sane attempt to use panics for recoverable error handling.