I think your parent may be slightly confused, in the sense of terminology: "owning reference" is a contradiction in Rust terms.

Here's the document I believe your parent is referring to: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSt2VB1zQAJ6JDMa...

The claim in the article:

> Yes, C++ can be made safer; in fact, it can even be made memory safe.

The claim from this document:

> We attempted to represent ownership and borrowing through the C++ type system, however the language does not lend itself to this. Thus memory safety in C++ would need to be achieved through runtime checks.

It doesn't use "owning reference" anywhere.

Thanks for the clarification!

However, I also got confused, and just subsituted "pointer" for "reference" in my head. References, apart from smart pointers, are indeed a problem for memory safety.