I'd say Rust is much more like Ocaml (with very different memory management) than anything related to C++ (in fact, if you unlearn C++, or know any ML-ish language, idiomatic Rust becomes significantly easier). Ownership types are probably Rust's main difference relative to any systems language, I think the first attempt to bring it to a C-ish language is probably Verona: https://microsoft.github.io/verona/explore.html (though it's very immature)
Definitely not; what do they have in common beyond being statically typed and compiled?
Where they differ: memory safety, sum types (don't tell me std::variant is a valid replacement), move semantics, having pointers, classes, GC vs RAII, statement vs expressions... That's a lot of differences.
What do you mean 'beyond'? It's not like there are many other languages that have compile-time polymorphism. (Java, Go, C, etc., don't.)
> memory safety, sum types (don't tell me std::variant is a valid replacement), move semantics, having pointers, classes, GC vs RAII, statement vs expressions... That's a lot of differences.
ML ignores the real performance and architecture considerations, so yeah, of course it is a simpler and more 'elegant' language. As a teaching aid, yeah, I think all C++ programmers should be forced to program something in an ML-derived language.
But once you start handling the real-world edge cases and requirements you'd end up in a place very similar to C++.
> What do you mean 'beyond'? It's not like there are many other languages that have compile-time polymorphism. (Java, Go, C, etc., don't.)
Java does, it's called generics. Also D, rust, Ada, free pascal, nim, and most statically typed languages from the last 3 decades (even Go is finally getting them ). Still can't see why C++ is closer to ML than C, since it's literally an almost compatible superset of C.
