alt Hacker NewsThere are an endless number of modern MLs that do the same thing. That's not a novelty - Rust was novel in making it part of a low-level language.
There are an endless number of modern MLs that do the same thing. That's not a novelty - Rust was novel in making it part of a low-level language.
I don't think being low level is the main innovation, really. There are several things Rust did right over traditional ML. Explicitly caring about learnability and the "weirdness budget". Having great error messages that don't require a course in category theory (many ML) or 800kB of scrollback buffer (C++) to understand.
Having great tools. Excellent documentation. Being friendly to new users.
Yes, it's also a systems language without a runtime. But that's not the novel part. You could write horrors in C++ that approximate ML even without language support. There are eldritch libraries where some kind of pattern matching is done via generic lambdas.
The main difference is developper UX. Good tools, good error messages, quality of life. The novelty is making ML not painful.