Hello everyone,
I'm writing a small/midsize simulation program (library+binary, maybe around 5 000-10 000 lines) for a research group. (The binary will contain things like reading the parameters, and setup of the simulations, so it might has to be changed during "normal" usage, e.g. if the content/structure of a parameter file changes.) And I'm not sure what would be the proper use of panics and errors.
Most probably it will be used only by them, and they will have full access to the source code, but they are mostly less experienced in programming. (Actually nor I'm a really experienced programmer.) So I would like to write the program as easy and (more importantly) safe to use (and extend) as possible. It won't be used in production, so crashes are mostly acceptable.
So I guess if some point of the program shouldn't be reachable (not even with improper use of the library, but only because of an actual bug in it) I should use unreachable!, to indicate that it's a bug.
But I'm not sure if I should panic when there is a logical error in the use of the library. For example most of the parameters should be set (from parameter files) once at the beginning of a run. So I was thinking about if it's OK to panic if the user tries to set any of these parameters twice. (Because it is a potential source of bugs.) So he/she can't "ignore" the returned Error message (by accident or by purpose) e.g. the following way:
match result { Ok(_) => {/*DO SOME STUFF*/}, Err(_) => {/*DO NOTHING*/} }
+1: Does it change anything, if later there would be a "public release" after all. So that other reserach groups might use the program as well, where they not necessarily wants to know the very fine details of the library, just use the public interface in the binary. (Or just want to use the provided binary as is, and only modify the (relevant) input file(s).)