> Rust has nothing new (even the lifetime stuff is copied) really.

Rust has nothing new by academic standards, and this is an explicit goal of the project. (And that's why it has yet to support e.g. Haskell-like higher-kinded types; or dependent types for compile-time programming: the interaction with its low-level featureset is very much an open question.) It's incredibly novel as a production language, of course.