3 ms·

This makes sense. It's like when I'm solving a project euler problem, I don't use verbose output because it runs much faster without having to print everything

• jakub_g 11y ago
  That's exactly my experience. Once I wrote some naive PE solution in nodejs and added some logging at each step. After few minutes and far from a solution I stopped it and disabled logging. I got the solution within seconds. The diff was few orders of magnitude, which was pretty surprising for me.
  • arjie 11y ago
    Sometimes writing to the terminal can be the slowest part because it's unbuffered by default in an interactive prompt, so even just redirecting stdout to /dev/null (or even a file) can be faster. Had that happen some ten years ago, so my explanation could be out of date or misremembered but the effect was real.
    • btilly 11y ago
      Your explanation is correct. That is the semantics of Unix stdio buffering as implemented by glibc. So across a wide variety of languages, you'll see a significant performance difference if you are doing lots of writes to the terminal. On the other hand if you didn't do this, then interactive terminal programs would be entirely unusable.