to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99 compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form [restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
amusingly, this cuts more than 10% off the run time of printf("a"); on the machine i tested it on. sadly the same optimization is not possible for snprintf without duplicating all the pseudo-FILE setup code, which is not worth it.