Archive for June, 2015


SLogLib: An easy to use, fully customizable and extensible, cross-platform logging library

A long time ago when I was doing PhD I was implementing a very complex geometric algorithm for computing intersection of two triangular meshes. There were bugs in code which would trigger only in certain edge cases. Since it was a GUI program using std::cout was not an option. Initially I tried writing messages to a file but soon realized it was too tedious as code was spanned across several files and I had to manually insert file names, function names, line numbers for every logging message.

A quick search on Internet revealed many logging libraries. I tried couple of them (unfortunately I can’t remember their names now) but none of them allowed customization of the output. The libraries I came across could output to variety of devices, supported multi-threading and many other fancy features but it was not possible to change the way messages was reported to the user. This was very important to me because I wanted to format my messages in a particular way so that I can easily check how my code was crashing on edge cases.

So, I wrote the first version of SLogLib sometime in 2005. It was build on a single principle that user should be in complete control of how messages are written to devices. In order to do that, SLogLib wraps all information required for logging into a structure called Message and passes it to a Formatter. The Formatter converts the Message structure to a std::string which will be outputted to the device. The Formatter must be written by the user. However, to make it easier to start using SLogLib and illustrate how to write a Formatter few Formatters are included with SLogLib.

Over past decade SLogLib has been very useful to me for a variety of projects and I hope that other can find it useful as well. SLogLib is hosted on Github under MIT license. You can clone of fork it from here: https://github.com/saurabhg17/SLogLib.




Paramecium under Microscope in Pond Water

Paramecium in a sample of water taken from swan lake in Singapore Botanical Gardens.