Richer logging/tracing status for C++ applications

Question

There are plenty of logging/trace systems for letting your program output data or strings or state as it runs. Most of these let you print arbitrary strings which you can view live or after your program runs.

I noticed an ad here on SO for Smartinspect which seems to take this to a higher level, giving stack traces for each log, fancier options like plotting graphs and data values which change over time, and a lot of polish to the basic idea of a simple list of output text strings.

Since I use C++, Smartinspect won't even work for me.

A little googling finds tons of logging frameworks, but nothing that seems to do anything more than text dumps. Are their fancier tools (similar to Smartinspect?) that do more? Commercial or open source is fine, and multiplatform is a big plus.

Answer 1

I know this is not the answer you are most probably looking for but I would suggest that such a framework will be very hard (if not impossible) to find for C++. Doing something like dumping the stack cannot be done in a portable way as it can in a language like Java, which not only shares a common runtime accross all platforms, but provides powerful introspection capabilities too.

I don't program in Java, but my guess is that it can provide a stack-trace in the same way as Python: the stack is probably just another object in the runtime which can be inspected and manipulated.

C++ on the other hand has none of these niceities: its meant to be a close-to-the-metal language that basically adds object-orientism to C (I'm sure others will come up with much more elanorate explanations of C++'s benefit's over C but thats another discussion).

In short, C++ is not rich enough at the level required to provide the kind of features you require in a generic way. There may be some platform-specific code that could get some of this info at defined points for you out there, but it certainly wont be standards compliant, cross-platform C++.

With regards to graphs etc, that sounds much more like post-processing, which you should either be able to find something for, or more likely, you can perhaps output your log messages in a format which can be interpreted by some of these existing tools.

Other things you could look at would be integrating with syslogd, for which again, there may be richer analysis tools for (this would provide you with a capability along the lines of the one advertised for SmartInspect - that is TCP/IP based logging).

NB: a lot of what I said here about C++ comes from previous experiences trying to find decent frameworks in C++ to do tweaky, introspective type things (such as proper mock objects etc).

Answer 2

If you can restrict yourself to a certain platform you can add stack traces to your logs manually. We use e.g. the glibc functionality to get stack traces on Linux to attach stack traces into our exception class. There is similar functionalyty available on Windows, but as mentioned these infrastructures are not portable.

Answer 3

I wrote a article about dumping the stack in C/C++ with Windows and Unix/Linux at DDJ some years ago. Maybe it helps you:

See http://www.ddj.com/architect/185300443