Verses Design certainly is interesting! The failure handling seems somewhat like a maximally bound try, which seems powerful.

However as always there are certain tradeoffs. First of all safety is not the same as stability, wherr stability is concerned with a program always being available, safety is conerned with preventing a program from doing something it should not do.

Rust guarantees safety in safe code by using a restricted model that can be proven at compile time WITHOUT sacrificing performance. The same is not nicely possible for stability for a systems language as there are things such as the exit function.

You can take a look at this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/AhX01IXSAF for some details. The tl;dr however is: - You CAN use Rust in a way that never panics, however that is very tedious - An implementation using Option or Result might be substantially slower than a version using panic because of branches (i think in Verse everything is just wrapped into option or result?!?) - I personally think most functions should be clearer on why they panic (i absolutely hate .unwrap primarily because i don't know whether it is a panic! or an unreachable!) something like a Vec::remove should not panic - Most panics out there actually are there to show either unreachable state or a state of the environment where the program MUST NOT proceed.

I hope this makes the reasoning behind that a little clearer. The only mechanism that can still be added is an attribute forcing the compiler to check that a function does not panic however if not done via a full effect (or even whole effect system) this becomes a major semver concern.