In Rust, panics are a mechanism for handling unrecoverable errors or exceptional situations. When a panic occurs, it indicates that something has gone wrong, and the program's execution cannot continue safely. Rust provides several mechanisms for handling panics:

1. Unwinding Panics : By default, Rust uses unwinding panics. When a panic occurs, the stack is unwound, meaning the runtime will walk back through the call stack and clean up resources (such as freeing memory and closing files) as it unwinds. This behavior is similar to exception handling in other languages.

   Unwinding panics can be enabled in the Cargo.toml file with the `panic = "unwind"` setting. It is the default behavior unless specifically configured otherwise.

2. Aborting Panics : Rust also provides an alternative panic mode called aborting panics. In this mode, the program terminates immediately without unwinding the stack or running any cleanup code. Aborting panics are generally faster and require less overhead but may leave resources in an inconsistent state.

   Aborting panics can be enabled in the Cargo.toml file with the `panic = "abort"` setting. It can be useful in certain situations where immediate termination is preferred, such as in embedded systems or when explicitly optimizing for performance.

3. Panic Handlers : Rust allows you to define custom panic handlers that are invoked when a panic occurs. You can use the `std::panic::set_hook` function to set a custom panic handler, which can perform additional actions or provide customized panic behavior. For example, you can log the panic, display an error message, or perform any other necessary cleanup before the program terminates.

   Here's an example of setting a custom panic handler:

   use std::panic;

   fn custom_panic_handler(info: &panic::PanicInfo) {
       // Custom panic handling code
       println!("Panic occurred: {}", info);
   }

   fn main() {
       panic::set_hook(Box::new(custom_panic_handler));

       // Rest of the program
   }​

4. `panic!` Macro : Rust provides the `panic!` macro for explicitly triggering a panic. It can be used to generate panics in specific situations when an error or exceptional condition is encountered. The `panic!` macro accepts an optional error message or any expression that implements the `Display` trait.

   panic!("Something went wrong");​

5. `Result` and `unwrap`: In Rust, it's common to use the `Result` type for error handling. Instead of panicking, you can propagate errors up the call stack using the `Result` type and handle them at appropriate levels. The `unwrap` method on `Result` can be used to retrieve the value if it's `Ok`, but it will panic if the `Result` is an `Err`. It's important to handle errors properly and avoid unnecessary panics.

   let result: Result<i32, String> = Err("Something went wrong".to_string());
   let value = result.unwrap();  // Panics if result is an Err​

Handling panics in Rust involves a balance between safety, performance, and code correctness. It's important to carefully consider the appropriate panic strategy for your application and handle panics in a way that ensures proper cleanup, error reporting, and program termination when necessary.