&gt; So now using const is some kind of difficult task? Not much cognitive overhead there. I thought everyone was onboard with immutability these days.<p>The fact that if you make everything totally immutable you can write safe C++ is (a) not true; (b) even if it were true, a totally irrelevant point in practice since not everything can be immutable. &quot;C++ is memory-safe if you don&#x27;t mutate anything anywhere&quot; is a completely uninteresting point to the real world (even if it were true).<p>&gt; My point is that safe low-overhead data structures with non-dangling, pointers protected from nullptr dereferencing ARE possible in C++ and not Rust. Yes, you have to put const after every type. Call that vigilance if you want. It&#x27;s a really small price to pay IMO.<p>No, it&#x27;s completely wrong. You have no protection from dangling references in C++.