You absolutely can catch and handle a panic in Rust [0]. Panics are just exceptions by a different name. Although, I do agree that the Rust ecosystem tries hard to avoid using panics, which is good.

[0] Example of catching, handling, and "swallowing" a panic in Rust (GTP4 wrote this): https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

This is very uncommon to do and cannot be compared to exceptions

Learned something new. I feel though it's better if most programmers didn't know about this. It looks like cursed knowledge.

It's not exactly cursed knowledge, you just have to have enough judgement to understand where it's appropriate.

Trying to do magic and patch something on a panic and retry is cursed indeed. If it's about cleaning up resources of a thread and logging this somewhere, then there's nothing cursed about this.

Catching a panic is _morally_ equivalent to catching a SIGSEGV. It is not meant for normal program error conditions and expected failures (e.g. "No such file").

I.e. only to be used in exceptional cases.

> Exceptions are ways to crash the program in a controlled manner with the ability for these crashes to be caught midway before the program crashes and handled correctly.

> In rust you can only crash it explicitly using the panic! Macro. No handling.

You can catch Rust panics with `catch_unwind()` if you compiled your program with `-Cpanic=unwind` (default on most platforms). Under the hood it uses stack unwinding, just like C++ and co, exceptions. But Rust doesn't consider this idiomatic error handling, it's only used in a few special situations (biggest ones are test frameworks, and web servers where one buggy session shouldn't take down the process).

I don’t disagree with you that just because rust has a feature similar to exceptions, that it has exceptions, but https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html does exist.