I'd tend to agree with your understanding of the path Rust's development took, but it is certainly not clear cut which led to which. I am certainly willing to b

I'd tend to agree with your understanding of the path Rust's development took, but it is certainly not clear cut which led to which. I am certainly willing to be corrected (my memory is getting rough at this point in my life), but I remember the bifurcation of mutability and alias-ability being present in Graydon's original pitch deck, which existed as a prototype with garbage collection being expected to exist. Then after some work, I thought the language devs realized that with some extra rules, which became the lifetime semantics, there was a feasible method for not requiring a garbage collector, but still remain fairly free of manual/explicit memory management by developers.