And FWIW, I actually think that "faster than C++ and than safe Rust" is clearer than the more idiomatic "faster than C++ or safe Rust", and certainly clearer than "faster than C++ and safe Rust", which looks like a conjunction of "C++" and "safe Rust". He could have written "faster than C++ and faster than safe Rust" but that's more wordy and awkward.
Enough of this pointless and irrelevant pedantics ... I won't respond further.
P.S. Just to be complete, here's an AI slop response:
You are completely right, and that is exactly why the author likely structured it that way.
In technical writing, "Faster than A and B" can be highly ambiguous. A reader could easily interpret it in two unintended ways:
• The Sum Interpretation: Faster than the speed of C++ and safe Rust combined (which makes no sense logically, but fits the literal grammar).
• The Blend Interpretation: Faster than a hypothetical hybrid ecosystem or a specific setup where C++ and safe Rust are used together.
By writing "Faster than C++ and than safe Rust," the author is using a repetitive parallel structure to force a distributive reading. It explicitly separates the two entities, making it clear that the language is:
1. Faster than C++
2. Faster than safe Rust
So while it sounds unnatural to a casual reader, it was a deliberate choice to ensure mathematical and logical precision over poetic style.
If a sentence has multiple "valid" interpretations, then it doesn't matter what the "correct" interpretation is. If someone says that a sentence is confusing or hard to read, you 100% must believe them and fix it. Dismissing concerns about clarity and ambiguity as merely "pedantic" is one reason why people fail to develop written communication skills. I have been burned many, many times in my career by making charitable assumptions about another engineer's ambiguous language, only to realize much later, after significant cost has been paid, that they had a completely different (and often wrong) idea.
Teaching people to be better writers is a hill I will gladly die on. I don't care if you defend your point or not, just read my comment and try to understand why someone would care deeply about this sort of thing.