That's fine. My aim is to clarify Rust's design and choices. I don't have strong opinions about what should be in the post.

> I'll add that the essay has a footnote saying

Honestly I have an entirely different beef with this footnote: `chars` is for codepoints, not really "characters", because what a "character" is in Unicode is very complicated.

> My follow-on presumption is that most Rust libraries use this sort of idiomatic production code, where allocation failures simply panic.

Yes, I wouldn't argue that most Rust code uses these try_ variants, because of the whole overcommit thing. But in contexts where it does matter, people do. The expectations are different based on context. Lots of Rust code expects (and enforces) no allocations at all, but that doesn't mean I'd claim that all Rust code does.

I also think it's fine to want to hold libraries, C or Rust, to a higher standard with regards to allocation failure, but in practice, most people (in both languages) do not find the juice worth the squeeze, and so don't really do it.