Why is istream/ostream slow

Question

At 50:40 of http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/GoingNative/2013/Writing-Quick-Code-in-Cpp-Quickly Andrei Alexandrescu makes a joke about how not efficient/slow istream is.

Answer 1

On a similar topic, STL says: "You can call setvbuf() to enable buffering on stdout."

https://web.archive.org/web/20170329163751/https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/642876/std-wcout-is-ten-times-slower-than-wprintf-performance-bug-in-c-library