Regardless of whether you feel that these static guarantees buy you anything, C++ does not have them and Rust does; the two solutions are not equivalent. Const

Regardless of whether you feel that these static guarantees buy you anything, C++ does not have them and Rust does; the two solutions are not equivalent. Const references only guarantee that you are not mutating through the reference, not that someone else isn't--if you are writing a library that accepts one, you cannot prevent misuse by users. This is an important difference from Rust. In any case, you still haven't explained how unique_ptr helps with the other two things I mentioned (ensuring that data protected by a mutex cannot be accessed without acquring the lock, and safely sharing and/or mutating data on another thread's stack). The blog post explains how Rust does it; C++ simply does not have the necessary types.