I was chatting with a friend and showed him how printf("%s") printed random memory in C, whereas writefln("%s") in D threw an Exception upon execution. It's probably not a completely fair comparison but that's a different topic.

I admit to being confused as to why it passed compilation at all in the first place. Surely the "%s" literal is just as known at compilation as an enum would be.

Is there any button in D that could be leveraged to statically assert that the number of arguments precisely match the number of format specifiers, iff the pattern is static/enum/literal?

I asked in #d and had it pointed out that this could be solved via an overload of writefln that took the pattern as a template instantiation argument, to which I conceed. The main con would naturally be that you end up with template bloat. You could also have tooling (dfix/dscanner) handle it for you.

But the compiler has all the pieces of information needed to see it's wrong, doesn't it?

How much of this kind of thing is evaluated during the CTFE passes?

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