C, C++, Rust, Go, etc have no special distinction between reference types and primitive types but rather everything is a value and some values are pointers/references. In a language with operator overloading, I don’t see why you’d ever want to check string identity by default. Interestingly, Go doesn’t have operator overloading but it treats strings as a special case including doing a string comparison for ==. Not saying this is better or worse, although no one makes mistakes with string comparison as far as I’m aware, for whatever that is worth.