JuliaLang/julia — comment on commit 932b9789af241d986236872c66ce6db70967705c
File: j/printf.j line 469
By StefanKarpinski:

Ok. Once you/I benchmark which is faster, I will change them all to use whatever's faster. There's a few cases where we can pre-construct a padding string of a known size. The _jl_printf_pad function already takes a maximum padding size parameter. I could make it take a minimum as well quite easily and then it could print the fixed minimum padding size and either a single conditional print or a loop for the remaining characters. Or some combination of these strategies. Since I used that consistently, it's quite easy to change at this point.