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Which is? You were supposed to get a list of features, it's always supposed to be there, what do you do? The person writing that code is thinking corrupted file or broken hard drive, panic is the correct thing to do. People are pointing fingers at that piece of code but to be honest I would point fingers upstream, to either the optimization that introduced the fixed size memory area or to the pipeline producing the features file who didn't check that the size of the file was under the limit.
Speaking of the optimization, the right thing to do there would have been to reallocate the struct to a bigger size if the preallocated one is insufficient. But I bet that would have introduced a bunch of ownership problems, hence we can circle back to this being a rust problem.
This is a problem caused by updating a linked list, a data structure that rust has historically struggled to implement without using unsafe.
I'm not saying "panic is the wrong thing to do" in the situation they had. It might be the right thing to do! I'm just saying that blaming the language for the programmer choosing to panic is a bad line of argument.
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