I’ve almost finished preparing my upcoming C++ library release. This is free-to-use source code that extends existing standard library stream and buffer classes to provide thread-safe stream-style output to a variety of media including std::cout, std::wcout, files, console windows and pretty much anywhere else you might care to send streams of text for debugging or logging purposes via a simple statically polymorphic interface.
Source streams can send information to several stream targets concurrently and runtime filtering allows output verbosity to be changed at any point without a recompile by using member functions or via direct injection using stream manipulators – useful for filtering customer-facing logs as well as changing debug output verbosity on the fly. Information sent can be prefixed with a time & date stamp, line number or pretty much any other piece of information you could imagine, again by using my provided example classes as an interface guide.
Because the code is based upon established Standard Library stream classes you get almost all of the benefits of those classes including format manipulators and locale imbuing.
A simple aliasing of types through a preprocessor define can reduce the code footprint of the streams and all literals sent directly to them to zero: useful if debug output needs stripping from binaries easily during compilation – for a games console release candidate, for example.
The library requires only C++’11 support and has so far been tested on Windows and Linux (PC and ARM architectures). Most Unicode text formats and integral C++ character types are catered for, albeit with limitations already inherent in the existing Standard Library and the platforms it is implemented on – more on this in my next post.
Just getting the last code tests, tidy-ups and documentation finished, so check back in a week or two for the library release.