I recently ran into a requirements for retrofitting a logging library to an existing project. My first instinct was to throw Pantheios at it as I’ve used it before and It Just Worked. Unfortunately in this case, we needed the ability to log to more than two event sinks and it looked like this was getting a little awkward with Pantheios, which prompted me to look at Boost.Log.

After some digging through the documentation and the samples, I managed to get the logging going to the three event sinks we needed. So far, so good, but every time I started up the program it reported an unhandled exception on Windows 7 when it was trying to initialise the simple_event_log backend and the software wasn’t run as administrator. Curiously enough, the log messages still did appear in the event log, just with lots of unnecessary decoration.

It’s bit of a link roundup from the past couple of months. Most of you probably saw these already as I’d think you’re probably reading the same blogs.

C++ links

VS2010 SP1 Beta: What’s in it for C++ developers. While I’m not going to chance installing the beta on my main developer workstation, it looks like there are some interesting features in the service pack. I hope that the IDE stability has also been improved.

A piece of code I recently worked with required data structures that hold unique, sorted data elements. The requirement for the data being both sorted and unique came from it being fed into std::set_intersection() so using an std::set seemed to be an obvious way of fulfilling these requirements. The code did fulfill all the requirements but I found the performance somewhat wanting in this particular implementation (Visual Studio 2008 with the standard library implementation shipped by Microsoft). The main problem was is that this code is extremely critical to the performance of the application and it simply wasn’t fast enough at this point.

Thud, thud, thud…

The sound of the developer’s head banging on the desk late at night.

What happened? Well, I had a requirement to make use of some smart pointers to handle a somewhat complicated resource management issue that was mostly being ignored in the current implementation, mainly on the grounds of it being slightly to complicated to handle successfully using manual pointer management. The result - not entirely unexpected - was a not so nice memory leak.