ILP is not the correct metric, total runtime is (I was confused as well initially, but it is well explained in the article). the initial rust code had higher ILP simply because it has to execute more code for the bound checks. The C++ code stalls waiting for memory, while rust can fill up those bubbles with the checks (and that's why the checks do not cause slowdown initially). But as the code gets progressively optimized, the stalls are removed and the the C++ code can match the rust ILP, but at this point rust needs to execute more code and get penalized leading to an higher runtime. After the bounds checks are removed from the rust code, both implementations converge to the same ILP and runtime.