alt Hacker NewsYes, but at this point the critical piece that made no-GC memory safety possible - linear types - had already been researched and known in the FP community. Rust's critical invention was "what if we modeled heap ownership and borrowing with linear types".
Okay, strictly speaking, Rust types are affine, not linear. Leaking Rust values is a safe operation. In a linear Rust the compiler would have to prove all values do not leak, but this would be incredibly difficult and probably make reference counting illegal.
Yeah, this makes sense. Although all this affine type stuff was also the basis for the C++ move semantics (although the resulting type system isn't affine at all, the mental model is very much that, with deleted copy constructors and all), which predates Rust project by at least a few years. So by the time Rust 1.0 rolled out, it wasn't a new concept at all even in system programming circles.
The actually innovative thing about Rust is how they made object lifetimes into a H-M-esque type system and used this 50 year old algorithm to detect dangling pointers at compile time.