Klib VS C++ Format

If you want a generic, extremely high performance implementation. I really recommend khash: https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib/blob/master/khashl.h

Most importantly, sqzlib is fully compatible with klib/kseq.h one of the highest performance fastA/Q parsers. This means that any application that uses kseq.h for fastA/Q parsing, can be easily modified to use sqzlib instead. You can find patched versions of seqstats, minimap2, and bwa-mem2 in my github, or you can patch them yourself with the included patches.

I don;t know if you are aware of khash? It's a very nifty hash table implementation. It is one of the fastest hash table implementations out there. Heavily used in bioinformatics. You said in your post that you are a macro guy, well, you are in for a treat with this library.

This is in fact a pretty common pattern in production code.

Here's an entire suit of type safe generic data structures in C: https://github.com/attractivechaos/klib

You will probably want to invest some time into either finding a good data structures library (preferable) or writing your own data structures (fine to do but not a good use of your time if you're starting out). You can try SGLIB or klib.

use fmt https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt it can be used header only and gives you safe string formatting that you can use for the filename.

{fmt} is a fast(er) and safe(r) alternative to C stdio (printf,...) and C++ iostreams (std::cout,...) that uses a Pythonesque format string syntax and is the origin and inspiration of C++20's std::format and C++23's upcoming std::print.

Look at another library that implements printing in C++, fmt, especially to part dedicated to benchmarks, you will see that this library is much faster then std::ostream (which is cout) so there is definitely room for improvement.

Any idea how it compares to FMT?

std::format unfortunately is only supported by MSVC at this point, so if you’re on gcc/clang/other you’ll need to stick to fmt

And overall slower than some alternatives like fmt library which I highly recomend

Here is link number 1 - Previous text "fmt"

Conan or Vcpkg are probably the best way forward to begin with. Seriously, stop what you are doing and go try those out on something simpler first, e.g. A hello world using fmtfmt, or a unit test using catch2.