I'm very confused by this claim. Rust's borrow checker is new, but everything else in the language is extremely familiar and recognizable to me from other languages I've worked with.
Structs and enums are all over the place
Free function definitions, and methods defined on a data type, are extremely common
Rust Traits are ways of naming groups of operations to be associated with different types, and share a lot of similarity with Type classes, roles, interfaces, mixins, etc. present in many common languages
async/await is similarly present in many common languages
Generics / Parametric Polymorphism, extremely familiar from C++, Java, C#, etc.
It's almost all modern takes on normal common PL things that have been in many languages for decades
So by my perspective, I see a very normal imperative language, with its own take and small quirks on very familiar features, and the only feature I've been able to come up with that's "completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades" is the borrow checker. One new unique feature seems well within the weirdness budget of a new language.
Could you expand a bit more on what it looks like from your perspective? What other features or properties of the language seem strange, alien, foreign, or otherwise completely unfamiliar to you?
Structs and enums are all over the place
Free function definitions, and methods defined on a data type, are extremely common
Rust Traits are ways of naming groups of operations to be associated with different types, and share a lot of similarity with Type classes, roles, interfaces, mixins, etc. present in many common languages
async/await is similarly present in many common languages
Generics / Parametric Polymorphism, extremely familiar from C++, Java, C#, etc.
It's almost all modern takes on normal common PL things that have been in many languages for decades
So by my perspective, I see a very normal imperative language, with its own take and small quirks on very familiar features, and the only feature I've been able to come up with that's "completely unlike every other language people have been using for decades" is the borrow checker. One new unique feature seems well within the weirdness budget of a new language.
Could you expand a bit more on what it looks like from your perspective? What other features or properties of the language seem strange, alien, foreign, or otherwise completely unfamiliar to you?