As the paper mentioned, I brought this up during the LWG review, so it
should be unsurprising that I think this should be synchronized at least
for ostreams.

In one of our codebases, where formatting started with iostreams and
gradually shifted to {fmt}, there are lots of code of the form:

struct A {
    int a; int b;
    friend std::ostream& operator<<(std::ostream& os, A const& a) {
        fmt::print(os, "{{a={}, b={}}}", a.a, a.b);
        return os;
    }
};

This seems like a perfectly valid way to implement operator<< to me -
except that it doesn't work if fmt::print (and now std::print) can
sometimes bypass things in os's buffer. With iostreams in particular, <<
naturally encourages writing partial lines:

A a{2, 4};
std::cout << "A is " << a << '\n'; // might print "{a=2, b=4}A is "

And having this only happen when writing to a terminal means that it's
going to be hard to catch in tests - normally those tests would format
something into a buffer and compare with the expected output, which won't
engage the reordering case.


On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 12:11 PM Inbal Levi via Lib-Ext <
lib-ext_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> * Correction to the title - paper is *P2539*
>
> On Mon, 28 Mar 2022 at 20:09, Inbal Levi <sinbal2l_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>> Today we have a paper in a bit of a different format (😉) -
>> this is an *Info* paper, which the fmt library author wrote to notify
>> LEWG of the current behaviour.
>> Currently there's *no action* suggested in the paper, but we would like the
>> author to *get an indication on the amount of support for the status
>> quo, as well as **whether a change is needed.*
>>
>> P2539R0: Should the output of std::print to a terminal be synchronized
>> with the underlying stream? (wg21.link/P2539)
>> by: Victor Zverovich
>>
>> ***
>> *From the Discussion:*
>> To prevent mojibake std::print may use a native Unicode API when writing
>> to a terminal bypassing the stream buffer. During the review of [P2093]
>> <http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2022/p2539r0.html#biblio-p2093> "Formatted
>> output" Tim Song suggested that synchronizing std::print with the
>> underlying stream may be beneficial for gradual adoption.
>>
>> *Some meta data:*
>>
>> - *Bottom Line: *Neither {fmt} ([FMT]) nor Rust ([RUST-STDIO]) do
>> such synchronization in their implementations of print.
>> - To indicate your opinion on whether a change is needed (reasoning
>> is, of course, welcome):
>> - If you support the status quo (no change): please response with *"No
>> Change"*
>> - If you think a change is needed (synchronize the output with the
>> underlying steam): please response* "+1"*
>>
>> ***
>>
>> *Weekly reviews improve quality!*
>> Running weekly reviews allows more iterations on each proposal, which
>> hopefully, in turn, will result in more accurate and subtle fixes.
>>
>> Thank you for taking the time to review the proposal,
>> and have a great week!
>>
>> Inbal Levi
>>
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