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It buffers all of its output statements in memory before writing to stdout:

Here's the fastgron printer if you want to compare:

Why?

It appears to be so it can sort the lines. Not sure how useful that is however.

It shouldn't need to buffer the output to do that, right?

Correct.

An ironic near-miss on the UNIX philosophy. There's a great UNIX tool that will handle sorting arbitrarily large files!

It will mess up array indices, though.

Wouldn’t “sort -n” work with indices?

It's tricky to specify the sorting criterium: you have to indicate the column. Gron's output looks like this:

a.b[0].c.d[0]: ... a.b[0].e[0].f: ...