> The key to all these changes has been a focus on the core concepts of ownership and borrowing. Initially, we introduced ownership as a means of transferring data safely and efficiently between tasks, but over time we have realized that the same mechanism allows us to move all sorts of things out of the language and into libraries. The resulting design is not only simpler to learn, but it is also much “closer to the metal” than we ever thought possible before. All Rust language constructs have a very direct mapping to machine operations, and Rust has no required runtime or external dependencies.

Almost sounds like they borrowed this thinking from Exokernel design... I think Rust is shaping up to be a very exciting language.