Thursday, June 19, 2014

XCGLogger: Logging Library for Swift

Dave Wood introduces XCGLogger:

In Swift, we lost this functionality. The reason this was traditionally done with a #define, and not a function or class, is so that we can use the __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __FUNCTION__, __FILE__, and __LINE__ macros. The preprocessor replaces those macros with their actual values. For example, __FILE__ will always contain the filename where the macro is placed for example. If you were to use them in a logging function, the macros would always contain the information of the logging function, not the calling function, rendering them useless.

[…]

How does this work when I said earlier that using __FUNCTION__ and its friends in a function only gives you the information in the function instead of where it’s called? Well, that’s the secret sauce I discovered last week. If you set the default value of a parameter in a function to one of the macros, the compiler fills in that value at the calling location giving us the effect we need. Giving us access to the correct macro values inside the function that’s called.

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