Interesting. I think my perspective is that the handrails are so useful that I can live with the few cases they get in the way, because it's rare they're actual

Interesting. I think my perspective is that the handrails are so useful that I can live with the few cases they get in the way, because it's rare they're actually a performance sticking point. Indeed, the handrails (at least in principle) can add much in terms of performance with e.g. the strong no-alias guarantees and iterator semantics. I guess if you spend all your time writing complicated graph based data structures over pointers you might have a different opinion!