unique_ptr doesn't have any aliasing guarantees, unique_ptr::get() will happily hand out references to the interior pointer. It does give you non-ambiguous own

unique_ptr doesn't have any aliasing guarantees, unique_ptr::get() will happily hand out references to the interior pointer. It does give you non-ambiguous ownership semantics which is a good thing but there's still plenty of ways to misuse/abuse it. That said if you can make the aliasing guarantees(such as Rust's borrow checker does) that opens up the possibility of automatically applying restrict semantics[1] which enables further set of optimizations available to the compiler. [1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/restrict https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/restrict