In this context, I'm using "crash" to mean something like a program fault, i.e. an uncontrolled termination orchestrated by the kernel rather than the program itself. Rust programs generally terminate in a controlled manner, even if that manner is analogous to an unchecked exception.

It's also not my experience that Rust code, on average, panics on abnormal inputs. I've seen it happen, but the presence of e.g. safe iterators and access APIs means that you see a lot less of the "crash from invalid offset or index" behavior you see in C codebases.

(However, as pointed out in the adjacent thread, none of this really has anything to do with what "safe" means in Rust; controlled termination is one way to preserve safety, but idiomatic Rust codebases tend to lean much more heavily in the "error and result types for everything" direction. This in and of itself is arguably non-ideal in some cases.)

That's kind of up to you as the developer though. I generally avoid writing functions that can panic -- I'd even argue any non-test code that panics is simply poorly written, because you can't "catch" a panic like you can in a high-level language. Better to return an error result and let the calling code decide how to handle it. Which often means showing an error to the user, but that's better than an unexpected crash.