This commit moves all logging out of the standard library into an external
crate. This crate is the new crate which is responsible for all logging macros
and logging implementation. A few reasons for this change are:
* The crate map has always been a bit of a code smell among rust programs. It
has difficulty being loaded on almost all platforms, and it's used almost
exclusively for logging and only logging. Removing the crate map is one of the
end goals of this movement.
* The compiler has a fair bit of special support for logging. It has the
__log_level() expression as well as generating a global word per module
specifying the log level. This is unfairly favoring the built-in logging
system, and is much better done purely in libraries instead of the compiler
itself.
* Initialization of logging is much easier to do if there is no reliance on a
magical crate map being available to set module log levels.
* If the logging library can be written outside of the standard library, there's
no reason that it shouldn't be. It's likely that we're not going to build the
highest quality logging library of all time, so third-party libraries should
be able to provide just as high-quality logging systems as the default one
provided in the rust distribution.
With a migration such as this, the change does not come for free. There are some
subtle changes in the behavior of liblog vs the previous logging macros:
* The core change of this migration is that there is no longer a physical
log-level per module. This concept is still emulated (it is quite useful), but
there is now only a global log level, not a local one. This global log level
is a reflection of the maximum of all log levels specified. The previously
generated logging code looked like:
if specified_level <= __module_log_level() {
println!(...)
}
The newly generated code looks like:
if specified_level <= ::log::LOG_LEVEL {
if ::log::module_enabled(module_path!()) {
println!(...)
}
}
Notably, the first layer of checking is still intended to be "super fast" in
that it's just a load of a global word and a compare. The second layer of
checking is executed to determine if the current module does indeed have
logging turned on.
This means that if any module has a debug log level turned on, all modules
with debug log levels get a little bit slower (they all do more expensive
dynamic checks to determine if they're turned on or not).
Semantically, this migration brings no change in this respect, but
runtime-wise, this will have a perf impact on some code.
* A `RUST_LOG=::help` directive will no longer print out a list of all modules
that can be logged. This is because the crate map will no longer specify the
log levels of all modules, so the list of modules is not known. Additionally,
warnings can no longer be provided if a malformed logging directive was
supplied.
The new "hello world" for logging looks like:
#[phase(syntax, link)]
extern crate log;
fn main() {
debug!("Hello, world!");
}
Formatting via reflection has been a little questionable for some time now, and
it's a little unfortunate that one of the standard macros will silently use
reflection when you weren't expecting it. This adds small bits of code bloat to
libraries, as well as not always being necessary. In light of this information,
this commit switches assert_eq!() to using {} in the error message instead of
{:?}.
In updating existing code, there were a few error cases that I encountered:
* It's impossible to define Show for [T, ..N]. I think DST will alleviate this
because we can define Show for [T].
* A few types here and there just needed a #[deriving(Show)]
* Type parameters needed a Show bound, I often moved this to `assert!(a == b)`
* `Path` doesn't implement `Show`, so assert_eq!() cannot be used on two paths.
I don't think this is much of a regression though because {:?} on paths looks
awful (it's a byte array).
Concretely speaking, this shaved 10K off a 656K binary. Not a lot, but sometime
significant for smaller binaries.
This commit changes the ToStr trait to:
impl<T: fmt::Show> ToStr for T {
fn to_str(&self) -> ~str { format!("{}", *self) }
}
The ToStr trait has been on the chopping block for quite awhile now, and this is
the final nail in its coffin. The trait and the corresponding method are not
being removed as part of this commit, but rather any implementations of the
`ToStr` trait are being forbidden because of the generic impl. The new way to
get the `to_str()` method to work is to implement `fmt::Show`.
Formatting into a `&mut Writer` (as `format!` does) is much more efficient than
`ToStr` when building up large strings. The `ToStr` trait forces many
intermediate allocations to be made while the `fmt::Show` trait allows
incremental buildup in the same heap allocated buffer. Additionally, the
`fmt::Show` trait is much more extensible in terms of interoperation with other
`Writer` instances and in more situations. By design the `ToStr` trait requires
at least one allocation whereas the `fmt::Show` trait does not require any
allocations.
Closes#8242Closes#9806
