It's actually somewhat hard to hit that panic in a realistic scenario. This is because you are unlikely to be using slice indices that are not on a character boundary. Where would you even get them from? All the standard library functions will return byte indices on a character boundary. For example, if you try to do something like slice the string between first occurrence of character 'a', and of character 'z', you'll do something like

  let start = s.find('a')?;
  let end = s.find('z')?;
  let sub = &s[start..end];

and it will never panic, because find will never return something that's not on a char boundary.