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

I figured that printing characters directly would generally be more efficient than printing entire strings which have to be allocated somewhere. Also, it amounts to a form of explicit loop unrolling. In this code in general, I opted for printing individual characters over strings. If that's not the right choice, it's pretty easy to change.