How do `Result` and `panic!` fit into a comprehensive error handling strategy in a larger Rust application?

In a comprehensive strategy, `Result` is the primary mechanism for handling expected, recoverable errors, allowing them to be propagated, logged, or handled at appropriate layers of the application without crashing. This enables graceful degradation and fault tolerance. `panic!` serves as a last resort, a 'circuit breaker' for unexpected and unrecoverable errors that signify a severe bug or critical failure, preventing the program from continuing in an incorrect state. In multi-threaded applications, panics in one thread might be caught by the spawning thread using `std::thread::catch_unwind`, allowing the main thread to decide how to react (e.g., log, restart work, or terminate the entire application gracefully) rather than letting the whole process crash immediately, though recovering state after such an event is complex and often avoided.