Comment by vlovich123

A language like Rust makes the Error and Option types first-class. It’ll be a compiler warning (or error? Don’t remember right now) if you ignore the return from a function that returns one of these. Go requires a separate linter and relies on uncaught variables. Minor distinction but important one because defaults matter.

If you want to panic on error/option (i.e. you don’t think it’s going to happen), you add an exclamation mark after the error. If you want to unwrap but propagate the error effortlessly, add a question mark. This syntactic sugar is a pretty common ideas at this point not unique to Rust. What is a bit more unique is that Error and Option are sum types. This means that you can’t just access the value without unwrapping them somehow and unwrapping requires you to either handle the error by a match or conditional statement, propagate (?), or panic (calling .unwrap() function). But you have to make that decision and can’t ignore it so while you have to think about what you want the error handling to look like, you can’t ever accidentally forget (& since mostly you forward, ? Makes things easy even if you need to bridge different error types).