In my case it wouldn't have raised an exception though, it would have just been UB.

It's not like there's not exceptions in Rust though. The error handling is thorough to a fault when it's used. Unwrap is just a shortcut to say "I know there might be bad input, I don't want to handle it right now, just let me do it and I'll accept the panic."

By exceptions, I’m referring to languages with exceptions as a dedicated language construct with automatic stack unwinding, and preferably without UB (e.g. Java or C#). Rust doesn’t have exceptions in that sense.

But panics in rust are pretty much exceptions though?

The differences are they are actually meant to be used for exceptional situations ("assert violated => there's a bug in this program" or "out of memory, catastrophic runtime situation") and they are not typed (rather, the panic holds a type erased payload).

Other than that, it performs unwinding without UB, and is catchable[0]. I'm not seeing the technical difference?

[0]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html

You’re probably right now that I’ve read up on it, I wasn’t previously aware of catch_unwind.

Glad to be of service. Note that the idiomatic error handling in rust is still Result based rather than panic/catch_unwind based.

Nevertheless a long living application like, e.g., a webserver will catch panics coming from its subtasks (e.g., its request handlers) via catch_unwind

exceptions would be awful in the kernel. I would be highly surprised if kernels like fuscia allow c++ exceptions.