Earlier quoted context omitted.
> like forgetting to check error returns One of the most common bugs in C (in my experience) is forgetting to check the error return on a malloc call. Kind of the worst of both worlds.
Using exceptions solves that problem and many others besides; it's a shame they're not currently in fashion. But you do end up needing them, so in Rust, we end up with error codes _and_ exceptions (but spelled "panic").
Rust doesn't have exceptions in the sense that C++/Java/Python/etc. have exceptions, i.e., things that unwind the stack and are part of a function's expected API. And I think the specific reason they're out of style is the inherent contradiction in that statement: either all the exceptions in the API of any of the functions you call are also part of your public API, or you're carefully filtering exceptions in any of the functions you call that raise them, and so you might as well not use unwinding.
Panics unwind the stack, but are not part of the API; they're for erroneous conditions where the usual right thing to do is to kill the process, but maybe you only want to kill e.g. the current HTTP request. Errors as return values / the Result type do not automatically unwind - they're just normal data types returned from a function - but they have syntax (the question mark operator) for explicitly unwinding them one step, and there are proposals in progress to introduce syntax that use "throw" or "catch" to refer to returning the error case or handling such returns in a block of code, so it seems like people think Result more closely matches exceptions in other languages.