How to Achieve Efficient Low-Cost Trace Logging in Go Without Performance Overhead?

Low-Cost Trace Logging in Go: Disabling Log Statements Without Performance Overhead

The ability to add debugging log statements to critical paths without impacting production performance is crucial. In Go, however, the cost of evaluating arguments for disabled statements can be significant.

The Tailored Logger

To address this, an EnabledLogger can be created, implementing the log.Logger interface and delegating output to a log.Logger only when enabled. This effectively hides the formatting and logging operations when disabled.

The Limitations of EnabledLogger

While the EnabledLogger minimizes evaluation cost for simple data types, it doesn't handle arbitrary function calls or complex expressions within log statements. To mitigate this, two options are available:

Wrapper Types:

Wrapper types like Stringify can defer function calls to be evaluated only when enabled. Although verbose, this approach ensures that the formatting is delayed until execution.

Manual Checks:

Explicit checks can also be used to perform the formatting conditionally, but this is error-prone and requires careful attention to ensure consistency.

Alternative Solutions

In addition to these options, other approaches include:

Formatter Interfaces:

fmt.Stringer and fmt.GoStringer can be leveraged to defer formatting for types that implement these interfaces.

Custom Loggers:

Overriding the default logger with a custom logger at runtime allows for finer control over the data evaluation.

Logger as a Boolean:

A simple yet effective technique is to use a bool value as the logger itself, simplifying the code by eliminating the need for if statements.

Code Generation:

Preprocessing macros can be emulated in Go using code generation, generating debug builds that include only the necessary tracing statements.

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