This bugs me too. At my current workplace the justification was that it was simpler, and therefore faster. I'm not sure I buy it though. It's still inefficient

This bugs me too. At my current workplace the justification was that it was simpler, and therefore faster. I'm not sure I buy it though. It's still inefficient in multiple ways and not nearly as flexible as one of the loggers based on the popular log4j style. My own personal preference is to use something which shoves your logging out to syslog. Then you get some pretty fine-grained control over what your logging is doing, and it's easy to say, do all of your logging across the network. Unfortunately, taking advantage of the UNIX concept of many small tools working together hasn't really taken root in many programmers' design approaches.