[pcwalton]

> Even the borrow checker is from research papers and languages from quite a while ago.

Eh, that's underselling Rust's contributions. Rust is more flexible than anything I know of when it comes to enforcing aliasing-xor-mutability. Cyclone for example was much more restrictive in disallowing aliasing (see Grossman's "Existential Types for Imperative Languages").

The key feature that Rust has is flow-sensitive permissions on unique loan paths, which is actually pretty novel as far as I'm aware.

[Manishearth]

I guess, yeah. I meant that what Cyclone does is along the same lines.

> The key feature that Rust has is flow-sensitive permissions on unique loan paths, which is actually pretty novel as far as I'm aware.

Huh, right.