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0 pointspdimitar5mo ago0 comments

I agree the failure is in testing but what you can and should do is raise in alert in your APM system before the runtime panic, in the code path that is deemed impossible to hit.

I am not trashing on them, I've made such mistakes in the past, but I do expect more from them is all.

And you will not believe how many alerts I got for the "impossible" errors.

I do agree there was not too much that could have been done, yes. But they should have invested in more visibility and be more thorough. I mean, hobbyist Rust devs seem to do that better.

It was just a bit disappointing for me. As mentioned above, I'd understand and sympathise with many other mistakes but this one stung a bit.

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duped5mo ago

There's certainly a discipline involved here, but it's usually something like guaranteeing all threads are unwind safe (via AssertUnwindSafe) and logging stack traces when your process keeps dying/can't be started after a fixed number of retries. Which would lead you to the culprit immediately.

I'm just pushing back a bit on the idea that unwrap() is unsafe - it's not, and I wouldn't even call it a foot gun. The code did what it was written to do, when it saw the input was garbage it crashed because it couldn't make sense of what to do next. That's a desirable property in reliable systems (of course monitoring that and testing it is what makes it reliable/fixable in the first place).

pdimitarOP5mo ago

We don't disagree, my main point was a bit broader and admittedly hijacked the original topic a bit, namely: `unwrap` and `expect` make many Rust devs too comfortable and these two are very tempting mistresses.

Using those should be done in an extremely disciplined manner. I agree that there are many legitimate uses but in the production Rust code I've seen this has rarely been the case. People just want to move on and then forget to circle back and add proper error handling. But yes, in this case that's not quite true. Still, my point that an APM alert should have been raised on the "impossible" code path before panicking, stands.

duped5mo ago

Oh for sure. I even think there deserve to be lints like "no code path reachable from main() is unwind-unsafe" which is a heavy hammer for many applications (like one-off CLI utils) but absolutely necessary for something like a long-lived daemon or server that's responsible for critical infrastructure.

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duped5mo ago

pdimitarOP5mo ago

duped5mo ago

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