You either want exhaustive checking or "just [want] to see if the thing they’re looking at holds an int or a string". OPs comment was about the latter and holds

You either want exhaustive checking or "just [want] to see if the thing they’re looking at holds an int or a string". OPs comment was about the latter and holds_alternative and get accomplishes that. FWIW, std::get is type-safe in that you cannot specify a type outside of the variant types. It's safe at runtime in that it will throw std::bad_variant_access if the active object doesn't match the type. And because of this, you think we may as well use enum+union? Even if you only plan on manually type switching on a variant, std::variant saves you from a lot of boilerplate.