Note: it's not like you can just sprinkle 'ref' on the return type of your methods willy nilly. Like 'ref'/'out' parameters, it requires you to do very specific things to keep your code safe/legal. As such, it's unlikely to just be added by people because, by and large, most code won't be equipped to actually handle it properly.

The codebases that will want to use this are already ones that have done a lot of work that makes them amenable to ref. i.e. game engines where you have large arrays of structs that you want to operate on in an efficient manner and whatnot.

I like the way its implemented in Perl. Use 'use strict' by default, and guard the block where you really need something unusual by 'no strict something' - refs, vars, subs - so neither compiler nor people reading your code never being confused whether is it a mistake or author's intention.

  #pragma warning disable ${list of warnings}

  #pragma warning restore ${list of warnings}

Although frankly the list of warnings to disable and restore consists of warning numbers, not names, which is not super convenient.