When a panic occurs in Rust, the program by default starts unwinding the stack. This means that Rust walks back up the stack and cleans up the data from each function it encounters. This cleanup work can be expensive, especially if the stack is deep.
In some cases, it may be desirable to avoid the overhead of unwinding the stack. For example, in a small embedded system, it may be more important to minimize the size of the binary than to clean up the stack. In these cases, you can choose to abort the program immediately instead of unwinding the stack.
To abort the program immediately on panic, you can add the following line to the appropriate [profile] section in your Cargo.toml file:
panic = 'abort'
For example, to abort on panic in release mode, you would add the following line to your Cargo.toml file:
[profile.release]
panic = 'abort'
When you abort the program on panic, the operating system will be responsible for cleaning up the memory that the program was using.
Which option you choose will depend on your specific needs. If you need to minimize the size of your binary or if you are running in an environment where unwinding the stack is expensive, then you may want to consider aborting on panic. However, be aware that aborting on panic may result in data loss.
