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I take a little bit different approach to logging. I work on automation systems and I have multiple levels of logging going on simultaneously. I'll mention just a couple. One is the trace buffer. It's always going and is essentially major events of note. The next one is what I call debug messages. These work like traces but have a mask associated with them that can be changed at run-time. The masks are bit-oriented and each bit is associated with a given functional aspect of the system. There are about two dozen of them defined now and there can be up to 63 because the zero bit is always set on. I wrote a special facility for this that uses shared memory to buffer up a whole bunch of messages and access is controlled by a mutex so multiple processes can use the same buffer. As it turns out, this is really, really fast which was my primary goal. I have measured the overhead for each message to be less than one microsecond on my old laptop. The same test was performed using printf calls to a console and the overhead was measured to be greater than 12uS. Writing directly to a text file is unacceptable for a variety of reasons. I tried that a few decades ago and abandoned it entirely. My systems involve multiple processes, each with multiple threads, and I worked for a long time to come up with a mechanism that solves all the problems and I'm pretty happy with this one. There's a lot more to it but I'll stop there.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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This is similar to what I do. I avoid mutex overhead by using a std::atomic_uint32_t as an index into a circular trace buffer, with each of its entries simply being a pointer to whatever holds the captured information.
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Perhaps "time travel/reverse" debugging would be useful
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That's very useful for debugging but out of the question on a live system. I can't count the number of times I've stepped over a function call, assuming the problem had to be further down, only to discover that I should have stepped into that function, and now the entire scenario has to be rerun from the beginning. 
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Perhaps I do not understand time travel debuggers as I have yet to utilize one. Please permit me to inquire further re your response. Would not a time travel debugger permit stepping backward and entering the function you refer to after having discovering there is where the problem lies without having to restart? Thank You Kindly - Cheerio
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I haven't used one either, but I think your characterization is accurate. My point was intended to mean that I wish I had been using one on many occasions.
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May I please inquire what is meant by a "live" system. Is it that which is in the hands of final users? If so is not the logging performed by a time travel debugger in such a situation equivalent to any logging which might otherwise occur? Best Wishes - Cheerios
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Yes, by "live system", I meant one in the hands of an end user. There's no way anything like a time travel debugger will be running on such a system. For one thing, it would cause it to run way too slow. Even if it didn't, how many users would let you connect to their system to do debugging? Their system would have to sit there, halted at a breakpoint that you were previously allowed to set, until you could do your debugging. And then you'd be dealing with a release build, and they're a total buttpain to debug because of compiler optimizations, no symbol tables, and so forth.
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ah, yes, another religious discussion!!
printf, nothing else than printf.
I'd rather be phishing!
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logging *is* religious which is fine. it's why I asked the question. I'm going to grab all these comments and see how I can fold the ideas into something useful.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Greetings and Kind Regards May I please inquire how you spend your time while your project is building? As for myself I twiddle my thumbs or watch a portion of a Star Trek episode or stream music or merely surf Cheerios
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Well, I work on three other projects, defrag my hard drive, brush my teeth... 
Depending on how big the system is, most of us scratch ourselves. Anyone want to back me up? 
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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What's your build time?
As a C# developer working with Visual Studio it's pretty much instant, so I guess I let out a sigh of relief that I didn't get any build errors 
It takes a little longer on the build server, but I'm not really interested in waiting for that so I just continue to work as usual.
It's not like I'm out of work after every commit I make to my build server 
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It is time you to move on to some serious project...
To check a simple feature the build is instant, but a full version build is almost 15 minutes - fortunately it is done on a build machine so I have time to do other things on my computer...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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I don't think I want to work on those kinds of projects 
I have 5 minute builds, but only on the build server, those are still instant on my machine.
Most of those five minutes are downloading NuGet packages anyway.
I've worked with longer builds in the past, but those were mostly badly designed applications or multiple services in a single repository.
For one project I had a really long local build, like 30 seconds, and I don't think I've ever figured out what the problem was
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I absolutely agree. I have several programs ERP, Production (this one interacts with AutoCAD), Maintenance, Human Resources, a MySQL - MariaDB query browser,... and when working on one of them compiling time never takes more than 10 secs (ERP or Production). These two have close to 700,000 lines of code each.
I have a Core I7 8 core 9th generation processor, 32 GB RAM, 6 GB graphic card (useless for compiling). When I am using my home laptop for the same task, its about one and a half minutes.
So I think the time required for long compiling times are several things. The power of the developing machine; the number of lines to be compiled; the number of external DLL, .h,... to be linked, etc. But definitely, the machine is a VERY IMPORTANT one.
My 2 cents.
Work hard and honestly and you will be rewarded by your own satisfaction.
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The question is: Have you made yourself dependent on the results of that 15 minute build to go on with your next task?
If you deliver a submodule that is syntactically correct, passes basic (read: fast) module tests, and honors all external interfaces, chances are that the best you can do is to go on to the next bug fix or functional extension, without waiting for the system build to tell you that everything is OK.
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trønderen wrote: Have you made yourself dependent on the results of that 15 minute build to go on with your next task?
Absolutly not... That would be a disaster... The big build initiated when someone aprove a pull request an it blocks noone and nothing...
I can move to the next task or even more take a break 
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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What is "serious" project? The place where you drop billion classes and believe it will work?
Man, I made "serios projects" like security system for access control (fingerprints, face recognition, NFC cards, locks, zones, etc). There was enough code, but hell... none of my projects compiled above 3 seconds! Maybe because I used C# ?
Pity C++ boys... they use ugly language with ugly ideas in compiler and have to wait minutes on elementary projects.
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In this context 'serious' was there to pull OP's leg...
This project has C# and JavaScript and made of several steps, the most time wasted on the Angular compiler (2/3) and on the minifing/combining process of JS and CSS...
The big project itself made of nearly 200 separate projects, and while on my local machine I may compile a handful the most (several seconds) the background build compiles all of them to create a homogenous build that at the end deployed to a test server...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Are you using punch cards?
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No I do not use punch cards I prefer negative entropy time crystals
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This is one of the reasons every time I quit smoking its coding that gets me started again.
Especially now that I don't have to worry about build times anymore because my machine is so fast, but I have to upload megabytes of firmware code via serial UART at only 921600 baud every time i make a change or two. That gives me just long enough of doing nothing that a smoke break is perfect.
This is going to be the death of me. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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I quit smoking every day - if it wasn't so enjoyable ...
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Depends on what you smoke, I presume.
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