There are idioms that you can use to help. Bounds checking solves the classic indexing past arrays problem and you can use tools to prove that you never use e.g

There are idioms that you can use to help. Bounds checking solves the classic indexing past arrays problem and you can use tools to prove that you never use e.g. the basic operator[]s on types for which it is not safe. Some of these idioms are not zero-cost though. My understanding is that to prevent use-after-free you basically can't use bare pointers or references, at all, ever. You need shared ownership everywhere (std::shared_ptr, not 0 cost), a garbage collector (In c++ that's probably another smart pointer type, not 0 cost), or additional metadata like the lifetimes fed into Rust's borrow checker. Based on my reading here on HN, I think Chrome has a reputation of using modern C++ features extensively to try to improve its memory safety, but it's really hard to do in C++. Edit: I realized this answer sounds like "yes idiom will fix it". To directly answer the question of "can you use idioms to fix this", no you can't. Evidence shows we screw it up. It's broken and you can't bolt on fixes to make it work.