> Do you agree with my belief that it is significantly less likely the borrow checker would've been invented if programming-languages researchers hadn't paid a

> Do you agree with my belief that it is significantly less likely the borrow checker would've been invented if programming-languages researchers hadn't paid a lot of attention to linear and affine types? As I mentioned in another comment, the concept of borrowing was already present in the earliest applications of linear types to programming languages. There was contemporaneous research into region systems for ML. Later languages like Vault and Cyclone combined these two ideas, using substructural types to manage regions. From a language feature perspective, the biggest innovation of Rust was integrating the ideas from Cyclone and other research languages with the emerging C++11 style of programming with implicit destructors, move semantics, and smart pointers.