Comment by saghm

To clarify, I didn't mean to imply that there were never any memory-safe alternatives to C before Rust (and re-reading my comment, I still don't think it sounds like that's what I was trying to say, but if that's how people are reading it, then I didn't do a good enough job of making that clear). I was trying to say that my understanding was that Rust was trying to take advantage of research ideas that had been introduced in the past decade or so but hadn't been applied much, which is a more narrow claim than it being the first one to try to tackle the problem at all.

As the parent comment indicates, it seems like there might have been more languages that were less known that did try to apply some of these ideas, so maybe I'm misremembering the history that I had heard, or maybe I did remember what I heard right, but the people who originally expressed it were similarly unaware that some of it had been tried already. Hearing more context about the time period I was referring to is definitely interesting, and I appreciate it being shared!