Right, like I said, this particular feature exists in a million languages. I'm talking about the whole set of features that Rust has; some are from research languages and may have never been seen in the industry before (e.g. regions/borrow checking), but they're not really new. This particular feature in Rust descended from the ML family (since Rust used to be ML-like), which in turn probably got it from Ada or w/e.
ML predates Ada by about 7 years, so that's unlikely. The way it is implemented in ML is most likely just an implementation of the mathematical concept of sum types rather than a feature influenced by existing programming languages.
I would probably restate it though. What is research vs. a product. I just read about 1nm transistors, but we're probably looking at 10 years before Intel, et al, have built all the infrastructure to reliably deliver a CPU based on it.
In the case of a language, I would say it's similar, do you have the support infrastructure in place? Rust is amazing in this regard: Cargo, crates.io, docs.rs, rustup, etc. on top of that you have at least one large company and many others pushing the language in a large and distributed product.
I would classify Rust as a production ready coding platform.
It seems very obvious now. I was thinking the purpose of the language was for performing research, but that didn't make much sense. I see now that it's the language itself that is the subject of research, not the tool. English is fun.
There are lots of languages in the world. The majority of them are written by a single person for themselves or (if there's funding involved) a small group of people who deeply understand the compiler. These are either research, hobbyist, or company languages depending on the context of the author. They exist to explore a particular idea or solve a specific problem and don't aspire to be widely used.
If you hear the term used disparagingly it's because they tend to have issues you generally wouldn't want to put up with when you're on the clock: compiler bugs, lack of error messages, large missing pieces in the standard lib, spectacularly bad performance, etc because those weren't the problems the language was meant to explore.