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I'm struggling to understand pros and cons of the C++ and C approaches to console output. C++ uses the stream approach with concatenation of operator<<, while for "C approach" I mean a print function taking as arguments a string with placeholders and values to be substituted to placeholders.

While I like the C++ approach I see that many logging libraries for C++ (e.g. spdlog) use the C approach; this makes me think that something with the C++ approach might be considered wrong by several people, but I cannot figure out what.

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    The c++ approach adds a new one on the top of the C one. Whether which one is most beneficial is for you to evaluate, on a case by case basis. Commented Feb 8, 2024 at 16:54

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The printf() approach has these disadvantages:

  1. No type-safety. Some compilers add some type-safety their own way, at least when the format-strings are known.

  2. No extensibility. Only the basic types baked in are understood and can be formatted. Thus, some projects bake their own. Yet again, some libraries have a way for limited dynamic extending, but that's both a global solution for a local problem, and not portable.

  3. No indexed parameters. Yet again, there are extensions in some common libs.

The <iostream> approach has its own disadvantages:

  1. No replaceable format-string.
  2. More verbose.
  3. It's a long chain of operators and operands, and thus cannot be forwarded.

In order to take the advantages of both and avoid the disadvantages of either, C++ added something new, though it builds on the latter: <format>

  1. It is type-safe and extensible.
  2. It uses a format-string with indexed arguments.
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  • This is pretty much the kind of information I was looking for, thank you. Commented Feb 8, 2024 at 18:13

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