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OK, thanks for clarifying. Reading back your original comment, I can see that its literal wording does say that. I was confused by you leading with printf handling, which is not really relevant to the original article (certainly not as much as writef()), so I inferred you were only mentioning it as context to writef() working similarly. Your use of the word "simply" also threw me off, it sounded like you thought compiler magic was a better solution that a language-level one.

I now see you were just making an unrelated point first. And having a specific compiler feature just for printf (and co.) is totally reasonable given how widespread it.

Your first link answers what would've been a follow up question: OK, writef() is a variadic template implemented with just normal language features, but does it do compile-time checking of the format? The docs says that it does:

> fmt: The format string. When passed as a compile-time argument, the string will be statically checked against the argument types passed.




Walter Bright is the creator of the D language so this is the best place to ask these questions.




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