The simply-typed lambda-calculus [01940] predated Abadi and Cardelli's object-calculus or sigma-calculus [01996] by 56 years, and both of those have trouble with side effects; the kind of non-sharing thread-safety guarantees Rust's type system can provide for mutable data structures stem from Jean-Yves Girard's "linear logic" [01987] and Wadler's "linear types" [01990], although Reynolds published a POPL paper in 01978 that we can recognize in retrospect as having invented a Rust-like affine typing system.

I've never been able to make heads or tails of Girard's paper but http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/slides/fpottier-2007-05-l... is an introductory divulgation of some of the pre-Rust history of this stuff. It makes me think I should read Wadler's 01990 paper.

So I think functional languages kind of had a head start, but also in a sense they have an easier problem to solve. ML's type system doesn't even have subtyping, much less mutation and resource leak safety.