zlacker

Looking at that unwrap as a Result<T> handler, the arguable issue with the code was the lack of informative explanation in the unexpected case. Panicking from the ill-defined state was desired behaviour, but explicit is always better.

The argument to the contrary is that reading the error out-load showed “the config initializer failing to return a valid configuration”. A panic trace saying “config init failed” is a minor improvement.

If we’re gonna guess and point fingers, I think the configuration init should be doing its own panicking and logging when it blows up.

>>boness+(OP)
First, again, that’s not the issue. The bug was in their database code. Could this codebase be improved with error messages? Yes for sure. But that wouldn’t have prevented the outage.

Almost every codebase I’ve ever worked in, in every programming language, could use better human readable error messages. But they’re notoriously hard to figure out ahead of time. You can only write good error messages for error cases you’ve thought through. And most error cases only become apparent when you stub your toe on them for real. Then you wonder how you missed it in the first place.

In any case, this sort of thing has nothing to do with rust.