I have always used Pascal for memory safe strings. Reference counted, mutable xor aliased, bound checked: their safety is perfect.

Unfortunately there is no string view, so you need to copy the substrings or use pointers/indices. I tried to build a string view, but the freepascal compiler is not smart enough to keep a struct of 2 elements in registers.

You don't infer potential ownership from a C++ ref. Likewise for char* strings unless it is to interface with a C api, in which case you will keep it anyway.