I can't say I agree with this? If C++ had an Rc equivalent (or if you'd write one yourself) it would be just as zero cost as it is in Rust, both in a single-threaded setting and in a multithreaded-setting. "Zero cost abstraction" doesn't mean that it cannot be misused or that it doesn't have any cognitive overhead to use correctly, just that it matches whatever you'd write without the abstraction in place. Plenty of "zero cost" features in C++ still need to you pay attention to not accidentally blow you leg off.

Simply put, just as a `unique_ptr` (`Box`) is an entirely different abstraction than `shared_ptr` (`Arc`), an `Rc` is also an entirely different abstraction than `Arc`, and C++ simply happens to completely lack `Rc` (at least in the standard; Boost of course has one). But if it had one you could use it with exactly the same cost as in Rust, you'd just have to manually make sure to not use it across threads (which indeed is easier said than done, which is why it's not in the standard), exactly the same as if you'd manually maintain the reference count without the nice(er) abstraction. Hence "zero cost abstraction".

Isn't the point of using atomics that there is virtually no performance penalty in single threaded contexts?

IMO "zero cost abstraction" just means "I have a slightly less vague idea of what this will compile to."

> C++ doesn’t have program-level thread safety by construction

It does. It’s called a process.

Everyone chose convenience and micro-benchmarks by choosing threads instead.