> lots of languages with full H-M inference

These are the ones that come to my mind:

- ML family (Standard ML, Caml, OCaml, F#)

- Haskell

None of these are competing in the same space as Rust: fine-grained memory control (read: perf on par w/ C++) with zero-cost abstractions for safety.

You can certainly argue that all of those languages are as safe as Rust, with the lack of nulls and explicit mutability (taken to a new level in Haskel), but you can't say they expose a memory models that actually reflects the underlying system (and are as tunable) to the extent that Rust does.