https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/221
The current terminology of "task failure" often causes problems when
writing or speaking about code. You often want to talk about the
possibility of an operation that returns a Result "failing", but cannot
because of the ambiguity with task failure. Instead, you have to speak
of "the failing case" or "when the operation does not succeed" or other
circumlocutions.
Likewise, we use a "Failure" header in rustdoc to describe when
operations may fail the task, but it would often be helpful to separate
out a section describing the "Err-producing" case.
We have been steadily moving away from task failure and toward Result as
an error-handling mechanism, so we should optimize our terminology
accordingly: Result-producing functions should be easy to describe.
To update your code, rename any call to `fail!` to `panic!` instead.
Assuming you have not created your own macro named `panic!`, this
will work on UNIX based systems:
grep -lZR 'fail!' . | xargs -0 -l sed -i -e 's/fail!/panic!/g'
You can of course also do this by hand.
[breaking-change]
Most of the comments are available on the Task structure itself, but this commit
is aimed at making FFI-style usage of Rust tasks a little nicer.
Primarily, this commit enables re-use of tasks across multiple invocations. The
method `run` will no longer unconditionally destroy the task itself. Rather, the
task will be internally re-usable if the closure specified did not fail. Once a
task has failed once it is considered poisoned and it can never be used again.
Along the way I tried to document shortcomings of the current method of tearing
down a task, opening a few issues as well. For now none of the behavior is a
showstopper, but it's useful to acknowledge it. Also along the way I attempted
to remove as much `unsafe` code as possible, opting for safer abstractions.
