Is there a 'catch' with FastFormat?

Question

I just read about the FastFormat C++ i/o formatting library, and it seems too good to be true: Faster even than printf, typesafe, and with what I consider a pleasing interface:<

Answer 1

If you look in detail at his performance benchmark page, you'll notice that good old C printf-family functions are still winning on Linux. In fact, the only test case where they perform poorly is the test case that should be static string concatenations, where I would expect printf to be wasteful. Moreover, GCC provides static type-checking on printf-style function calls, so the benefit of type-safety is reduced. So: if you are running on Linux and if you need the absolute best performance, FastFormat is probably not the optimal solution.