I believe the same thing about Rust. It's basically 100% value semantics with borrows being just manually applied performance hack.
And I think it's a wonderful way to code once you wrap your head around it and unlearn Java.
And I think it's a wonderful way to code once you wrap your head around it and unlearn Java.
I do think however that (safe) Rust can be said to have mutable value semantics, if you forget what a borrow “is” you find yourself exactly with a value-oriented language.