> The creator has said it's not.

Well that seems highly unlikely given the huge number of similarities.

Which similarities are these, that numerous other languages don't also have?

* Same names: fn, let, mut, pub, println, etc.

* Same everything-is-an-expression style. Blocks evaluate to the last expression in them.

* /// Doc comments

* ML style pattern matching

* Result type

* 'todo', 'panic'

"Whhaaa but you can find those features in other languages! You literally said ML-style you big idiot!!"

Indeed but Rust massively popularised a lot of those features (how many people actually use ML?) and the number of them makes it almost impossible that it isn't at least strongly inspired by Rust.

Interestingly they have fixed the tuple syntax issue - it's #(a, b, c) - but have copied the match pattern matching mistake where you can write what looks like a variable name and it becomes a pattern. That mistake has been known since the 70s.

I think basically everybody who designs programming languages is familiar with ML, even if it's not used in production all that often.

Then explain Go :-D

Go is a rare specimen: a programming language designed by people who are fundamentally suspicious of the field of programming language design.