Fast forward a few decades, and we're still very much on this journey of finding the right abstractions/interfaces/libraries/languages. I feel like there must be a complexity equivalent to Parkinson's law: complexity expands to fill the space left in between abstractions.
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".
And it's still possible to improve performance here without returning to manual memory management. Just replace it with something like this:
cat += *p;
cat += "+";
So while a much older date is probably appropriate, maybe 20-30 years ago, we can at least mark this (2022) until somebody justifies a particular previous date.
adampunk•57m ago