[SOLVED] Outputting to terminal for a debug compile only?

[Zeotronic]

C++: I'm working on a program and I decided the other day to include code to output information to terminal with which I could debug it. Specifically I want to know if there is a way to make the compiler ignore my code when I am not compiling a debug version, or short of that, a way to get my program to output essentially all of it's information to terminal in a way that is humanly legible, without adding a lot of new code.

[dribeas]

C++: I'm working on a program and I decided the other day to include code to output information to terminal with which I could debug it. Specifically I want to know if there is a way to make the compiler ignore my code when I am not compiling a debug version, or short of that, a way to get my program to output essentially all of it's information to terminal in a way that is humanly legible, without adding a lot of new code.

Classic solution is through the use of macros, something in the line of:



#ifdef _DEBUG
// Either std::cout or printf would be fine.
#define DEBUG(x) std::cout << x << std::endl
#else
#define DEBUG(x)
#endif


But I would go for a logging library for any but the simplest problems. Logging libraries are quite easy to use and they allow you to log/ignore logs at runtime with just a small runtime penalty. I use ACE (http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html) for that (company decision), but I used before log4cpp (http://log4cpp.sourceforge.net/) and it was really flexible and powerful. You can look into Boost (http://www.boost.org) logging library (I don't know if it was yet approved into Boost, but it is quite good)