Preventing users from creating unnamed instances of a class

The only sensible way I think about is to make the user pass the result of guard_creator::create to some guard_activator which takes a lvalue-reference as a parameter.

this way, the user of the class has no way but either create the object with a name (the sane option that most developers will do), or new it then dereference (insane options)

for example, you said in the comments you work on a non allocating asynchronous chain creator. I can think on an API which looks like this:

auto token = monad_creator().then([]{...}).then([]{...}).then([]{...}).create();
launch_async_monad(token); //gets token as Token&, the user has no way BUT create this object with a name 

If have access to the full potential of C++17, you can expand the idea of using a static factory function into something usefull: guarantied copy elision makes the static factory function possible even for non-movable classes, and the [[nodiscard]] attributes prompts the compiler to issue a warning if the return value is ignored.

class [[nodiscard]] Guard {
  public:
    Guard(Guard& other) = delete;
    ~Guard() { /* do sth. with _ptr */ }
    static Guard create(void* ptr) { return Guard(ptr); }
  private:
    Guard(void* ptr) : _ptr(ptr) {}
    void* _ptr;
};

int main(int, char**) {
  Guard::create(nullptr);
  //auto g = Guard::create(nullptr);
}

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