It is a big deal, however for many scenarios (like GUIs and game engines like Unreal/Unity) GCs are much better from productivity and tooling point of view, so it remains to be seen how much piece of the pie will be taken there.
And thanks to Rust, the designers of Swift, D, Chapel, C++, Ada, OCaml, Haskell, and maybe even C# and Java, are now taking linear types into consideration.
So for many deployment scenarios, GC + a linear types subset might be good enough, still one can thank Rust for those improvements even if indirectly.
As a programmer of Rust, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, C#, and Java, I’m well aware of these developments :). I definitely still strongly advocate for GC and prefer it when I don’t need the memory performance of linear types.
And thanks to Rust, the designers of Swift, D, Chapel, C++, Ada, OCaml, Haskell, and maybe even C# and Java, are now taking linear types into consideration.
So for many deployment scenarios, GC + a linear types subset might be good enough, still one can thank Rust for those improvements even if indirectly.