It's no accident that Rust's bootstrap compiler was written in OCaml. Rust borrows a lot of ideas from it. Arguably, OCaml and ML are closer ancestors of the language than C.

I like Rust, I use it as much as I can. But, it actually doesn't bring many new features to the table. What it's done is successfully learn from the past, scooping up the good ideas and ditching the bad ones. Its real selling point is how it wraps all of those old ideas up into a modern, well-maintained, stable package that's ready for use in the real world.