I originally published this post on my old blog in 2009. I’ve edited it a little for readability but left the contents unchanged, so it may be out of date and not reflect the current state of the pantheios library. I also haven’t been using pantheios for logging since about 2010, and have been using Boost.Log instead.

I recently had to come up with a logging solution for C++ code a JNI DLL/shared library that is providing the data translation layer between Java and underlying native C and C++ libraries. As usual, some logging was required to aid fault-finding in a production environment, if necessary. A quick survey of the state of C++ logging showed that not a lot had changed since I last looked at logging libraries. In fact, a lot of them seem to have survived unchanged for several years. I’m not sure if that is a good thing and a sign of maturity or a sign of “making do” and the low priority most projects assign to a performant logging library. Eventually I settled on pantheios as it offered several features that were crucial for this application. The major one was that pantheios it is extremely modular and will only link in the parts you really need. I consider this a major advantage over the more monolithic libraries that pull in all their functionality all the time, especially when you link them in as a static library (yes, log4cxx, I’m looking at you). Linking in the logging library as a static library was necessary to avoid conflicts with other libraries that are being used in the same process.