There's nothing really stopping gcc from doing as well here, since it ought to be able to spot that the format string never changes & roll out a custom sprintf(

There's nothing really stopping gcc from doing as well here, since it ought to be able to spot that the format string never changes & roll out a custom sprintf() that doesn't need to parse it every time. However, right now gcc doesn't do that, so it loses to a language implementation that does. The really sad thing is that using an ostringstream in C++ is even worse, despite the fact that C++ has all the types available to it & doesn't need to parse any format strings at all: Not enough template metaprogramming clearly!