[boost] Re: request for review. c++ tracing/logging library

From: Dimitry Kloper (dimka_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-01-07 19:27:02

Thanks for your comments guys.

The DGD documentation is far from rock solid. I am working on that.

> >> I have looked through your docs for a basic introduction explaining
how
> >> to use your library for debugging, and don't see much. Am I missing
> >> something?
> > 
> > I second that, I couldn't understand a thing there!

Again, the tutorial is missing, the little peaces of it which can be
found in the documentation are more notes for myself . If you want to
get basic start point please go to documentation of channel and
channelbuf classes.

I will try to explain dgd in a few words.

DGD was created for debugging of c++ implementations of different
computational geometry algorithms and their
visualizations. The requirements were simple:
1) I already had a bunch of output methods for cout. I wanted reuse them
without changing.
   So the lib must be iostream-based formatter library.
2) I wanted the resulting log to be fixed width to fit 80 column
terminal window or emacs
3) I wanted automatic indentation.
4) I wanted automatic word wrap.
5) I wanted all above as simple as possible
6) I wanted it on windows vc6 (now works with 7.0)

I considered libcwd before staring my work on dgd, but didn't find a
simple way to adopt it for my needs (please correct
me if I am wrong here):
1) It is not so easy to port libcwd to windows because memory debugging
and (probably) threading stuff.
2) libcwd can't make fixed width logs (probably newer versions do?)
which I really wanted.
3) I am still not sure, but I can't find in libcwd the way to use my
existing output operators without changing.

I was not aware of log4cpp, so I can't make in-deep comparison right
now. 

> 
> Other than threading the same, I would like also to add that it's not
clear
> what's the place of this library between libcwd and log4cpp. While
those
> two libraries differ in approach, DGD docs say functionality is the
same as
> for libcwd, with the only difference that DGD works on Windows. I
somehow
> doubt that logging parts of libcwd are seriously linux-dependent, so
maybe
> making it work on Windows is a better way.

Hope this helps.
--
 Dima