I prefer this approach. It's kind of like using `.expect()` or `.unwrap()` in Rust when there's no plausible way the call should fail. Like if my program writes out a JSON file and then reads it back in, and the file isn't value JSON, panicking is a reasonable way to deal with the situation. Someone the world got itself into a strange state I can't reasonably recover from.

Well, same here. If you're using strtol on data that must be well-formed, and it's not, and you're at an earlier stage of startup like parsing the config file, go ahead and blow up. That's almost certainly better than plowing ahead with invalid data.