It is not at all like Rust; it is a garbage collection system based on reference counting, pretty similar to Swift. This is obscured by the documentation for each using similar terminology (like "move semantics" and "ownership") to refer to systems with different characteristics.

Thanks for clarification withoutboats2! It's really confusing as Nim's move semantics "feel" very similar to Rust's (except that Nim is more relaxed regarding "use after move" - it simply performs a copy). I'll need to learn a lot more about the different concepts.