Early Rust didn’t have some of the things it had today, but we used to keep a list of papers that Rust either was inspired by or implemented the ideas from on the website, even if it was incomplete.
I also don’t believe that smart pointers in C++ count as affine? Move semantics in C++ work quite differently than in Rust. I could be wrong about that though, but given the whole copy by default thing, I’m not entirely sure that that counts. It might though.
Oh, and in the earliest days, literally Rust’s introduction inside of Mozilla, it was described as “ideas from the past, come to save the future.” Explicitly built on older PLT ideas that hadn’t made it mainstream yet. Rust may feel cutting edge for industry but it’s basically the opposite of avant garde theoretically speaking.