[genrilz]

The point I'm sure was to prevent the checks from incurring runtime overhead in production. Even in release mode, the overflow will only wrap rather than trigger undefined behavior, so this won't cause memory corruption unless you are writing unsafe code that ignores the possibility of overflow.

The checks being on in the debug config means your tests and replications of bug reports will catch overflow if they occur. If you are working on some sensitive application where you can't afford logic bugs from overflows but can afford panics/crashes, you can just turn on checks in release mode.

If you are working on a library which is meant to do something sensible on overflow, you can use the wide variety of member functions such as 'wrapping_add' or 'checked_add' to control what happens on overflow regardless of build configuration.

Finally, if your application can't afford to have logic bugs from overflows and also can't panic, you can use kani [0] to prove that overflow never happens.

All in all, it seems to me like Rust supports a wide variety of use cases pretty nicely.

[0]: https://github.com/model-checking/kani