alt Hacker NewsThey acknowledge that it's odd, and give this justification:
"Using runtime panics has the nice property that inline assembly in dead code doesn't get in the way of porting software to Fil-C. Also, it's consistent with how Fil-C usually reports errors."
Yeah
Also, like, this is the initial implementation so I kept it consistent with the rest of the error checking
If someone wants a compile time diagnostic they can submit a patch