What makes Rust special is that you need to acknowledge the potential errors when unwrapping the type. With a standard library and culture built on exposing the edge cases at compile time.
That is where the guarantees and feeling of certainty comes from.
For instance, Java could do the same, but in practice conversion methods throw runtime exceptions that you won't be warned about and your code will randomly crash if conversions fail, except in some cases when it doesn't. For casting between numeric types the language does have some legacy cruft, but for web applications nothing is stopping you from doing this. Java's explicit exception system is great at forcing developers to deal with potential failures, but in practice Java developers chose not to deal with exceptions so often that exceptions now get hidden.
Rust does this stuff in the standard library and that gives you the advantage that you don't need to explain the concept and convince every developer that this is a good idea. The same way Java has optional nullability annotations that are rarely used in practice because not every developer feels like adding them, unlike languages where nullability is part of the type system.
The concept is not exclusive to Rust, but I also haven't found it very popular outside of Rust developer circles.
Every time I see someone bringing up the idea of adding checked exceptions to a language (usually in these endless exceptions vs returning errors debates), it is met with "it won't work, look at Java", and it feels like a real shame. I'm sure complications of additional syntax would pay off just as fast as it does for regular type annotations.
It's more like "comptime safety feeling" => "language w/ visibility modifier" but the converse is not necessarily true. Without language support, it's back to C convention or workaround again.
If you are iterating over the files in a directory the Rust standard library gives you paths. Not strings.
To convert a path that to a regular string type which is valid unicode you need to acknowledge that the path may be invalid. Either unwrapping and panicking or handling the error.
To do this the standard library gives two options:
/// Yields a [`&str`] slice if the `Path` is valid unicode.
///
/// This conversion may entail doing a check for UTF-8 validity.
/// Note that validation is performed because non-UTF-8 strings are
/// perfectly valid for some OS.
pub fn to_str(&self) -> Option<&str>
Or accept that the conversion may be lossy:
/// Converts a Path to a Cow<str>.
///
/// Any non-UTF-8 sequences are replaced with U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER.
pub fn to_string_lossy(&self) -> Cow<'_, str>
You get to make a choice, and panicking/erroring is perfectly valid if you only expect valid unicode paths.
As the world and your software changes if you suddenly encounter a non-unicode path then you will immediately know where the error comes from and can fix the issue. Instead of trying to pinpoint the root source of an error far exposing itself far down stream.
> With a standard library and culture built on exposing the edge cases at compile time.
So, how exactly is "you need to acknowledge that the path may be invalid" from your example a compile-time trait? That's certainly not something you know during the compile-time, and if so, then you should be treating all the files like that, so, I see no difference here wrt other languages.
pub fn to_str(&self) -> Option<&str>
pub enum Option<T> {
None,
Some(T),
}
let my_valid_string = match path.to_str() {
Some(path) => path,
None => todo!("Cover invalid unicode case"),
}
https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
We can't know if a generic path is valid at compile time. But we can at compile time ensure that we must acknowledge and make a choice for the invalid case.
This now (in)famous blogpost on Go is what happens when you just pretend that everything works:
https://fasterthanli.me/articles/i-want-off-mr-golangs-wild-...
While a pragmatic choice, in reality it isn't very practical IMO. Most of the times you really don't know what to do with the error so you end up turning the condition either into an exception, because it really is an exceptional case, and/or assert on it as an invariant that is broken and which you believe is a programming (usage) error. In any case, you don't really know how to handle it well, and this is I believe often the case for kernel design too - they will try to eliminate as much as possible such cases with testing because they can't afford to panick during the runtime because that would actually be detrimental for QoS.
Even in C++ you have something not quite the same but similar with [[nodiscard]] qualifier but in practice I haven't really seen it being used much but when I did it was mostly annoying to deal with. It's like a hot potato that is being thrown across the API boundaries but nobody wants to deal with it.