Insulating layer?

> It’s not surprising that the C++ community hasn’t discovered a better way to approach safe references than the lifetime parameter model. After all, there isn’t a well-funded effort to advance C++ language-level lifetime safety. But there is in the Rust community. Rust has made valuable improvements to its lifetime safety design. Lots of effort goes into making borrow checking more permissive: The integration of mid-level IR and non-lexical lifetimes in 2016 revitalized the toolchain. Polonius[polonius] approaches dataflow analysis from the opposite direction, hoping to shake loose more improvements. Ideas like view types[view-types] and the sentinel pattern[sentinel-pattern] are being investigated. But all this activity has not discovered a mechanism that’s superior to lifetime parameters for specifying constraints. If something had been discovered, it would be integrated into the Rust language and I’d be proposing to adopt that into C++. For now, lifetime parameters are the best solution that the world has to offer.

Basically, if there was a simpler way then likely Rust developers would have already found it and implemented it, because they're actually looking for ways to make things simpler. The C++ community is barely engaging with the topic. The likely end result seems fairly obvious to me.