alt Hacker News"Panic-free" labels are so difficult to ascribe without being misleading because temporal memory effects can cause panics. Pusher too much onto your stack because the function happened to be preceded by a ton of other stack allocations? Crash. Heap too full and malloc failed? Crash. These things can happen from user input, so labelling a function no_panic just because it doesn't do any unchecked indexing can dangerously mislead readers into thinking code can't crash when it can.
There's plenty of independent interest in properly bounding stack usage because this would open up new use cases in deep embedded and Rust-on-the-GPU. Basically, if you statically exclude unbounded stack use, you don't even need memory protection to implement guard pages (or similar) for your call stack usage, which Rust now requires. But this probably requires work on the LLVM side, not just on Rust itself.
Failable memory allocations are already needed for Rust-on-Linux, so that also has independent interest.