The difference between \n and endl in C++
- 1 minAbout two years ago when I took my first C++ class, I remember my professor used both \n and endl to create new lines. Having been previously acquainted with \n from Python, I wondered what difference the two had on the running of a program. One day after class, I asked him what the difference was and he told me that endl also flushes the buffer.
I wanted to find out more about this, so when I got home I checked with the all-knowing StackOverflow for more information on the two and found out that endl is a stream manipulator that forces a flush the buffer which can have a negative impact on the performance of a program. This is in contrast to \n which is a typical escape sequence and only 1 byte (for '\n') or 2 bytes (for "\n") large. One interesting little nitpick is that using "\n" will cause the program to run just slightly slower than '\n' since "\n" is a string literal representing two characters, the '\n' newline character and the null terminator '\0'.
Therefore the wanton use of endl should be avoided in instances where performance is major issue.