> Rust's first release, and its version of "Memory Safety" was collecting quite a bit of attention

Note that this was not Rust's first stable release, but it's first public release. At the time it was still changing a lot and still had "garbage collected" types.

Yeah, it was the 0.1 release. I can't remember exactly when Rust entered the general "programming language discourse" on hackernews and /r/programming, but it was somewhere around here. I'm sure the people behind Go would have known about it by this point in time.

And while rust did have optional "garbage collected pointers", it's important to point out that it is not a garbage collected language. The ownership system and borrow checker were very much front-and-centre for the 0.1 release, it was what everyone was talking about.

Actually, my memory is that while the language had syntax to declare garbage collected pointers, it wasn't actually hooked up to a proper garbage collector. It was always more of a "we are reserving the syntax and we will hook it up when needed", and it turns out the ownership system was powerful enough that it was never needed.