Yeah, Java is pretty fast despite the fact that it still has these kinds of obviously suboptimal things going on.

I love how Zig, D and Rust do exactly what you say: parse the format string at compile time, making it super efficient at runtime (no parsing, no regex, just the optimal code to get the string you need).

I say this but I write most of my code in Java/Kotlin :D . I just wish I could write more low-level languages for super efficient code, but for what I do, Java is more than enough.