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References are absolutely modern C++. There isn't a nontrivial C++ program in existence that doesn't use references.

• int_19h 8y ago
  Yes, and most of those references are to locals that are passed as arguments to function calls that will never take their address. In other words, it's pass-by-ref - which is perfectly safe - not pointers. To obtain a reference to an object that is managed by a smart pointer, you would have to, at the minimum, explicitly dereference that pointer with *. In most cases, this also happens in an argument context, and the caller will maintain the pointer. It breaks when the pointer that's managing lifetime is a part of mutable state that the callee can touch somehow without returning - then it can cause the object to be freed while still holding a non-counting reference to it. At that point, you basically need something like Rust lifetime/ownership tracking to prevent such unsafe situations from happening.