I'm just surprised that the marketing blog post about the omnipotent new AI model (that no one outside Google can currently access - contrast with the Opus 5.5 / Astra launches) - doesn't pick examples where every metric is better than before.

Just compare how much better presented the Astra announcement was compared to this one: https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/

tbh while the astra announcement in that link had some good stuff it was scattered through so much boilerplate marketing speak that I had to force myself to read it and look for the content. I found the gemini blog post in the OP a lot more readable and engaging.

but that's a side issue; my main point is that you are underrating the impressiveness of getting a safe rust port of a highly optimised c++ library even nearly up to par with the original. the tradeoffs rust makes for memory safety cost it some of the raw speed of c++ even with all the zero cost abstractions and purely compile time guarantees they have. (tangentially i wonder if ats (https://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi/atslangweb/) would be a good candidate for LLM assisted ports; it seems way more advanced than rust and might actually get c-level performance with safety, but it's really hard to write.)