alt Hacker NewsI guess this is where the culture around rust shines. You can write crypt that returns a string in rust just fine, just like you can write crypt that returns a tagged union in C. Cultural differences and syntactic sugar change which version is idiomatic.
I suppose if people started writing lots of code that crashed on error in Rust some enterprising developer might improve the function to always return a non-error value and set it to ‘*’ in error cases.
The culture is downstream of the design IMO. In general, people write the API that is obvious. In C, returning a string is obvious, while defining a custom OptionalString type is high friction. In Rust, returning Option<String> is as easy and obvious as returning a String.