You want there to be a language-standard way of saying “I’m a backend for a web server and I don’t want to cause an error 500 but instead I want to crash the whole process”? Seems pretty specific to me.

Panic means “something’s wrong, this error isn’t recoverable”. In most contexts, the best thing to do is crash in this case. In some specific cases, if you keep things well-isolated enough (making HTTP handlers stateless, etc) you can design a system where panic means “something’s wrong, this error isn’t recoverable, and inform the remote end as such by rendering a 500 error”, and everything works just fine.

You seem to want some sort of truly fatal way of conveying errors. Panic is not that. If it was, Rust would not have designed panic to be handleable. It would be called “crash”, not panic. Go is similar… go’s panic is not meant for typical error handling, but it’s not synonymous with “crash”, either. It’s meant for situations where you want the moral equivalent of a crash, but taking the form of whatever makes sense for your use case. A multiplexing web server that renders proper 500 errors on a panic is basically the premiere use case doe this.