There are other imperative languages in the ML family too, right? OCaml has an imperative mode. I don't think Rust is that much different from other functional

There are other imperative languages in the ML family too, right? OCaml has an imperative mode. I don't think Rust is that much different from other functional languages. The main critical difference is the manual memory management feature - the way it's acknowledged and used throughout the language and the ecosystem means that the functional patterns commonly used in garbage collected languages don't look nearly as natural in Rust.