this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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If I'm writing C++, I'm usually optimizing for portability over performance, in which case I would prefer std::endl as it would yield the best results regardless of platform; it also keeps the end-of-line character out of other strings, making code just a little cleaner.
\n is for when I'm done pretending that anything that isn't Unix-like is OK, or I'm counting the cycles of every branch instruction.
std::endl provides zero portability benefits. C++ does have a portable newline abstraction, but it is called
\n, not endl.Thank you two for demonstrating the image in the post so well.
No, there's no guarantee that in every context \n is translated portably.
The same is true of std::endl. std::endl is simply defined as
<< '\n' << std::flush; nothing more, nothing less. In all cases where endl gives you a "properly translated" newline, so does\n.Ahhh, I see. Looks like the magic happens somewhere further down in iostream.
It's controlled by whether the stream's opened in text mode or binary mode. On Unix, they're the same, but on Windows, text mode has line ending conversion.
Yeah it's an artificial dichotomy based on a popular misconception of what std::endl is and how \n is interpreted.
Ultimately it does not ask about line endings, but about flushing, which is a completely orthogonal question.