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> The Rust version requires you to use your intuition to figure out that `unwrap()` will never panic here.

You should not use `unwrap` in a production product. It's there for prototyping and I think it's a mistake they have it (though the language already requires a good upfront time investment as it is). Use `?` and have your error propagate accordingly to the top of the chain. Have your own error types and convert from other error types.

    if !some_vec.empty() {
        print!("{}", some_vec.first().unwrap());
        // .. more code
    }

I don't know why you would check the first element of a vector. Use Rust type system to your advantage, and don't "convert" PHP code into Rust. Re-design your program. Also you don't need to check that the Vector is empty if you are using "first". "first" returns an Option with None if your vector is empty. My guess is that you have yet to exhaust the idioms Rust offers and approaching it in a PHP-like manner.

> > At the cost of introducing a bug/technical debt.

> At the cost of shipping a product!

Okay!

We tried this style in one of Google Earth's packages for a while (using an internal C++ class similar to Rust's Result). So many operations could theoretically fail (e.g. indexing out of bounds or an expected key not existing) that pretty much every single function in that package returned a Result. These "unexpected" errors would just fly up the stack, manually unwinding it, because nobody could really do anything with them. Once we had that, I really questioned some of our policies.

I can imagine a language where panics don't crash the entire application, but instead blast away the surrounding "region" of memory, leaving the rest of the program intact and able to keep running. Similar to catch_unwind, but if the language is aware of region boundaries, and only allows certain methods of communication between them, it would leave the rest of the memory in much more predictable possible states.

It may sound surprising, but it's actually possible with the right language constructs (Erlang folks know what I'm talking about!) and that way, we could once again have panics for unexpected errors, and Results for expected errors.

Sounds like what you want is how exceptions behave in most languages? Including c++?

> don't "convert" PHP code into Rust. Re-design your program.

Trust me, I am!

For example, I'm rewriting all the (very-efficient) PHP regex code to a much more convoluted version because Regex::new is so costly.

Less sarcastically, I am embracing the Rust Way where necessary. My complaint is that the Rust Way sometimes forces me to depart from the idealised pseudocode version of a given algorithm much more drastically than PHP does.

Any reason why you can't put the Regex in a once_cell and then keep on applying it?

Wait... You're rewriting the PHP regex code instead of using the regex crate?! Just...wait...why?

Are you using lazy_static? See: https://docs.rs/regex/latest/regex/#example-avoid-compiling-...

Rust noob here but couldn't you write

  if let Some(element) = some_vec.first() {
    println!("{}", element); 
    // .. more code
  }

and avoid the unwrap and the empty check?

Edit: Added a `let` I had forgotten.

Exactly (well other than "if let" here.)

Every time you have a Boolean if condition with an unwrap, it means you are not taking advantage of the type system.

Thanks, added.

Yes, but IMO that makes the code a bit more abstract:

You've left behind an explicit "is this collection non-empty" and you're instead relying on a property of a non-empty collection.

The PHP version can also be written as

    if (($element = reset($some_arr)) !== null) {
        echo $element;
    }

But that code is similarly divorced from the imaginary pseudocode equivalent

> Yes, but IMO that makes the code a bit more abstract:

> You've left behind an explicit "is this collection non-empty" and you're instead relying on a property of a non-empty collection.

More abstract for who? I think virtually all Rust programmers would easily understand the `if let` snippet, virtually all PHP programmers would understand the PHP snippet, and virtually all programmers of any language would understand that a non-empty array has a first element. I'm not at all convinced that most programmers would correctly guess that a function called `reset` is used to access the first element in an array though.

A collection is non-empty if and only if it has a first element. Therefore checking for non-emptiness is the same as checking for the existence of a first element.

You can usually use pattern matching to get around a check followed by an unwrap. I would rewrite your example as:

    if let [first, ..] = &some_vec {
        print!("{}", first);
        // .. more code
    }

Thanks, I did not know about that particular solution — that adheres more closely to the idealised pseudocode than any of the other Rust alternatives.

That sort of "flow typing" is extremely cool and I'd love to see it added to Rust. Perhaps something like mypy's proposed TypeGuard.