Bloat with std.(string.)format?

[Chris via Digitalmars-d-learn]

If I have code like this:

auto builder = appender!string;
builder ~= "Hello, World!";
builder ~= "I'm here!";
builder ~= "Now I'm there!";

the object file grows by 10-11 lines with each call to `builder 
~=`. If I use this:

builder ~= format("%s", "Hello, World!");
builder ~= format("%s", "I'm here!");
builder ~= format("%s", "Now I'm there!");

The object file is more than twice as big and it grows by 20 
lines with each call to `format`.

If I use

builder ~= format("%s %s %s", "Hello, World!", "I'm here!", "Now 
I'm there!");

the code bloat is even worse.

There are many situation where a formatting string is preferable 
to concatenation, however it adds _a lot_ of bloat. Would a 
custom formatter be preferable to reduce code bloat or should 
std/format.d be optimized? (Or both?)

dmd 2.067.1
-release -boundscheck=off -inline -O