It was actually much more heavily inspired by OCaml than Haskell early on. See this comment talking about it, which includes a quote from Graydon on the topic:

It was actually much more heavily inspired by OCaml than Haskell early on. See this comment talking about it, which includes a quote from Graydon on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24956301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24956301 But it’s true that much of the inspiration for Rust comes from functional languages, and the trait system is definitely inspired by Haskell.