Rust's goals for linear typing and regions changed. Ownership types didn't happen until typestate was abandoned. The current design is quite different from what was being explored before. If they're happy with what they've got, more power to them, but the project's priorities have changed dramatically in the last 2 years. I think it's worth asking why something that started seemingly as a research language backed off the original work and was converted into a relatively safe technology product in a short span of time.
I find it profoundly disquieting when redactions are created around the history of projects, pushing the impression that the place arrived at was what was wanted all along. Our failures can inform posterity as much as our successes.[1] The core Rust team has been perfectly candid about the history of the project.
I didn't claim (and neither did kibwen, who unlike me is a major Rust contributor) that Rust's approaches around memory management didn't change. But your claim that "Lifetimes aren't regions" is false -- lifetimes are squarely in the 30-year research history of region systems.
A region calculus[1], such as Tofte described, is not what I see in Rust as it exists today. It could've been so with typestate, if I understood the intent behind typestate correctly.
If what Rust has is understood to be regions, then I need a couple of words for distinguishing the two. Ordinarily, I refer to what Rust/C++ have as "ownership types" and what exists in research as regions/RBMM/RC.
As someone not terribly familiar with the literature but familiar with Rust's type system, I just spend a few minutes googling various pages about region based memory management (including Tofte + Talpin) as well as skimming your link (not very hard, I admit), and I don't really understand what it lets you do (that doesn't exist in a roughly analogous form in Rust). Well, there's the fact that most of the papers describe region inference, while Rust is fully explicit, but that doesn't seem critical to the scheme to me. Out of curiosity, I'd be interested to see you elaborate on the difference.
Also, I do not know what other 'PLs with similar facilities' exist with anywhere near as much effort put into them (other than Cyclone, which is dead). You mentioned C++, but it doesn't have lifetime checking at all, which is of course a core feature of Rust...
C++ doesn't cover the full extent of safety Rust offers at all, but there is a fair bit of overlap in how the functionality is packaged up WRT ownership types.
I checked the docs and it looks like at least http://doc.rust-lang.org/0.12.0/guide-lifetimes.html#named-l... is covered which was one of my objections. I still don't like that I can't design my own linearly typed constraints, but it appears that was never a goal to begin with. Not surprising given the lack of emphasis on expressive types.
As it stands my only options for linear'ish types are indexed Monads in Haskell or building a model of linear types in a proof assistant or DTPL.
I find it profoundly disquieting when redactions are created around the history of projects, pushing the impression that the place arrived at was what was wanted all along. Our failures can inform posterity as much as our successes.[1] The core Rust team has been perfectly candid about the history of the project.
[1]: Cf. pre-Monad IO subsystems for Haskell, http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dbg/readings/haskell-history.pd... and http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/papers...