[bjz_]

> But what I got instead was an ML with some low-level extensions; it felt like an enormous bait-and-switch, as nobody is interested in yet-another-functional-language.

Rust is not functional. It may draw heavy inspiration from statically typed FP, and closures, ADTs, pattern matching, and and expression-heavy programming style might give that impression, but it is at its heart a procedural systems language. As stated in the blog post, most of Rust's core features map directly to underlying machine instructions, and there is always the opportunity to cede control from the type system if you absolutely have to. Indeed, core library types like `Box<T>` and `Vec<T>` are at their fundamentally built on `unsafe` code.