rustex/book/src/02_basic_calculator/04_panics.md

Panics

Let's go back to the speed function you wrote for the "Variables" section. It probably looked something like this:

fn speed(start: u32, end: u32, time_elapsed: u32) -> u32 {
    let distance = end - start;
    distance / time_elapsed
}

If you have a keen eye, you might have spotted one issue¹ : what happens if time_elapsed is zero?

You can try it out on the Rust playground!
The program will exit with the following error message:

thread 'main' panicked at src/main.rs:3:5:
attempt to divide by zero

This is known as a panic.
A panic is Rust's way to signal that something went so wrong that the program can't continue executing, it's an unrecoverable error² . Division by zero classifies as such an error.

The panic! macro

You can intentionally trigger a panic by calling the panic! macro³ :

fn main() {
    panic!("This is a panic!");
    // The line below will never be executed
    let x = 1 + 2;
}

There are other mechanisms to work with recoverable errors in Rust, which we'll cover later. For the time being we'll stick with panics as a brutal but simple stopgap solution.

Further reading

• The panic! macro documentation

---

1. There's another issue with speed that we'll address soon enough. Can you spot it? ↩︎

2. You can try to catch a panic, but it should be a last resort attempt reserved for very specific circumstances. ↩︎

3. If it's followed by a !, it's a macro invocation. Think of macros as spicy functions for now. We'll cover them in more detail later in the course. ↩︎