Van Rossum: Python is not too slow (InfoWorld)

Rust has been produced specifically to minimize the need for garbage collection and the impact of the collector. Once one understands this, the design decisions for Rust become completely clear and intuitive.

Unique types allow deterministic destruction of resources - you are guaranteed not to have memory/resource leaks with them. Unfortunately, the next step (refcounted handles) can not make such guarantees. So they've stopped at unique types.

Dividing the RAM into independent thread-local heaps helps immensely - Erlang does it for exactly the same purpose, for example. Experience has taught us that truly pauseless 'global' garbage collectors are possible, but they either have a big overhead or require hardware assists (there's a company that even creates special hardware for high-speed GCs!).

The split between immutable and mutable types in Rust is interesting. But I don't think it can be simplified much. And no, Go doesn't have anything like it - you can pass mutable data using channels (which is actually an advantage in Go's programming style).