The safety part in this article is incorrect. There's a google doc somewhere where Google did an internal experiment and determined that safety c annot be achieved in C++ without an owning reference (essentially what Rust has).
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Maybe we're thinking of different things, but I don't think C++ has owning references, modern or not? There's regular references (&) which are definitely not owning, and owning pointers (unique_ptr and friends), but neither of those quite match Rust's &.