I'm no fan of Odin especially, but I'd expect that one obvious defence they'd offer is that this code potentially wastes a lot of resources and if you were writing in their language you'd more likely go "Wait, that seems like a bad idea..." and produce better code.

    cat += *p+"+";

1. Making a brand new std::string with the same text inside it as `p` but one longer so as to contain an extra plus symbol. Let's call this temporary string `tmp`

2. Paste that whole string on the end of the string named `cat`

3. Destroy `tmp` freeing the associated allocation if there is one

Now, C++ isn't a complete trash fire, the `cat` std::string is† an amortized constant time allocated growable array under the hood. Not to the same extent as Rust's String (which literally is Vec<u8> inside) but morally that's what is going on, so the appends to `cat` aren't a big performance disaster. But we are making a new string, which means potentially allocating, each time around the loop, and that's the exact sort of costly perf leak that a Zig or Odin programmer would notice here.

† All modern C++ std::string implementations use a crap short string optimisation, the most important thing this is doing - which is the big win for C++ is they can store their empty value, a single zero byte, without allocating but they can all store a few bytes of actual text before allocating. This might matter for your input strings if they are fairly short like "Bjarne" "Stroustrup" and "Fool" but it can't do "Disestablishmentarianism".