Case-by-case behavior

overflow-checks is a blunt tool: it's a global setting that affects the whole program.
It often happens that you want to handle integer overflows differently depending on the context: sometimes wrapping is the right choice, other times panicking is preferable.

wrapping_ methods

You can opt into wrapping arithmetic on a per-operation basis by using the wrapping_ methods¹.
For example, you can use wrapping_add to add two integers with wrapping:

let x = 255u8;
let y = 1u8;
let sum = x.wrapping_add(y);
assert_eq!(sum, 0);

saturating_ methods

Alternatively, you can opt into saturating arithmetic by using the saturating_ methods.
Instead of wrapping around, saturating arithmetic will return the maximum or minimum value for the integer type. For example:

let x = 255u8;
let y = 1u8;
let sum = x.saturating_add(y);
assert_eq!(sum, 255);

Since 255 + 1 is 256, which is bigger than u8::MAX, the result is u8::MAX (255).
The opposite happens for underflows: 0 - 1 is -1, which is smaller than u8::MIN, so the result is u8::MIN (0).

You can't get saturating arithmetic via the overflow-checks profile setting—you have to explicitly opt into it when performing the arithmetic operation.

Exercise

The exercise for this section is located in 02_basic_calculator/09_saturating