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I don't use Rust, but I'm going to defend it in this case. In fact, I'll go further and defend the "buggy" code in the Cloudflare incident. If your code is heavily configurable, and you can't load your config, what else are you supposed to do? The same thing is true if you can't connect to your (required) DB, allocate (required) memory, etc. Sometimes you just need to die, loudly, so that someone can come in and fix the problem. IME, the worst messes come not from programs cleanly dying, but from them taking a mortal wound and then limping along, making a horrific mess of things in the process.
One can certainly criticize the code for not having a nicer error message. Maybe Rust is to blame for that, at least? Does unwrap not have a way to provide an error string? Although, any engineer should see what's going on from one look at the offending line, so I doubt it would make that much of a difference. It's not reasonable to blame a language for letting coders deliberately crash the program, either.
IMO, the code itself is fine. The problem is that they deployed a new config to the entire internet all at once without checking that it even loads. THAT is baffling.
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