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Ok so I'm a bit of a coding noob, but couldn't you hypothetically catch panics before they happen by having some boilerplate you insert in every case that could cause one?

I guess checking to make sure you aren't dividing by zero before you divide every time or checking an index access against the bounds of an array could have some performance implications, and also it would be prohibitively hard to actually enforce it across your team?

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Yup, that would be the fix. It is a logical error to even try to be dividing by zero, so your code should handle it. Regardless of whether there is a panic, this is what you'd want to do.

But the problem is that people make mistakes or forget every once in a while, and as you get more people working on large programs, these mistakes happen more often.

So you have to assume that it'll most likely happen in your production software sooner or later. Crashing the whole program is a fairly catastrophic outcome in my opinion, and should be reserved for only truly unrecoverable problems like hardware failures.

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