It's not really an extra pointer, unless you assume there are no alignment issues. If you assume that there's zero padding between members, then yes, you can do 1 pointer for storage + 1 per view. In the follow-up post, I plan to either do one pointer per view, or one integer per view, haven't decided which.

The thing is, who should solve it? The different approaches you listed have different advantages, there isn't one right answer. If the language itself solves it for you, you are stuck with whatever solution the language picked. This would be fine in a higher level language, but not in C++.

You're right though that individual devs shouldn't be solving it, it should be in a library. If there's enough interest in these posts, I'm happy to put up my work (fully fleshed out and documented) on a github for people to use.