[jessermeyer]

Neither GCC nor Clang bake the final string into the data segment. If I had to guess, printf is the one preventing the more fancy optimizations to take place.

[vardump]

I think so too. Also, depending on stdlib output buffering, the external I/O behavior of 100 puts calls is potentially different from just one call.

In other words, there might be a different number of stdout write-calls.