Someone on Reddit pointed to this hard-to-find FAQ which sheds some light on what the point of it is:
https://github.com/mozilla/rust/wiki/Doc-project-FAQ

--bb

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:45 PM, bearophile <bearophileHUGS@lycos.com> wrote:
Ary Manzana:

> And also, what's the advantage of the language?

Its author is a very intelligent person, worth respect. Rust has both typestates and variable owning, and probably something else too, I have to study it better. It seems willing to become a direct competitor of D2.

Bye,
bearophile