On Thu, 4 May 2023 at 08:20, Jonathan Wakely <cxx_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 4 May 2023, 05:18 Simon Hill, <protogrammer_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> There's constexpr-cleverness going on in the format-string evaluation, so
> the generated binary code shouldn't (given a decent compiler and well
> written header code) be any larger or slower for users who don't use "%s",
> nor should the runtime libraries be affected. You can see this by the fact
> an invalid format string fails at compile time instead of runtime, that you
> can't pass a non-constexpr format string, and that the changes only need be
> made in a header with no runtime library rebuild.
>
> I know, I wrote the GCC implementation you're using :-)
>

What your observations actually show is that the format string is checked
for validity at compile-time, using a consteval function to verify its
syntax is valid. But if you use std::vformat instead of std::format, there
is no such checking. And the compile-time checking is just checking,
there's no "compile a state machine from the format string" step that
produces an optimized representation of the format string for use by
std::format. So the actual formatting is not done at compile-time, and the
format string is re-parsed at runtime.

And the fact you don't need to rebuild the runtime library is just because
it's an inline function, not because everything is done at compile-time.