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> How does anyone on the stack above handle this error? For a web application, you respond to the request with 5xx error.

Applications do many things. A degraded state (e.g. a single endpoint being broken) is often preferable to a full crash. It's very little effort to opt in to panics by calling unwrap(). It's a lot of effort to recover from panics. Let me, as the caller, make that decision.

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But any standard web framework already would use a panic handler to turn a panic within application code to a 5xx error.

Here's a discussion on actix-web and panic handlers: https://github.com/actix/actix-web/issues/1501

Some technical limits, a lot of cultural opposition. While it is possible to have a panic handler, it's generally viewed as a bad idea. Not everything is UnwindSafe, there are limits to how much a panic handler can do, concerns about memory leaks.

Again, the caller can turn it into a panic easily enough if that's what they want. leave the decision in their hands.

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