Can you?

I’ve never heard that from a C++ dev.

I don’t think any C++ dev worth talking about thinks that C++ is particularly safe, just that (modern) C++ has plenty of powerful safety features. (Like smart pointers. Analogous to rust’s Rc and Arc)

So much so that it approaches rust’s safety promises in the most common cases.

In what I’ve seen, C++ devs are largely unconvinced that rust is more safe than modern C++ in the most common cases, but rust has a much higher complexity cost, especially when integrating with C code.

It’s really hard to convince hardcore C and C++ devs to use rust, because most of the touted features are seen as fixes for skill issues. Not because they believe that rust is not safer.