CppTrail: High-Performance C++20 Logging

🏔️ Overview

CppTrail is a lightweight, header-only logging framework built for the modern C++20 era. It is specifically optimized for high-throughput environments—like "wire stuff" network protocol analysis—where low latency and thread safety are non-negotiable.

🏗️ Architecture

The library is built on a handle-implementation (pImpl) pattern. This ensures:

• Thread Safety: All backends use internal mutexes or producer-consumer queues.
• Resource Efficiency: An internal Object Pool recycles log entries to minimize heap pressure during high-frequency captures.
• Non-blocking I/O: Asynchronous loggers offload formatting and writing to background worker threads.

🕒 RFC 3339 Timestamps

CppTrail features a high-performance ISO 8601/RFC 3339 formatter.

• Zulu Time: 2026-03-01 15:17:34.672Z
• Local Time: 2026-03-01 15:17:34.672+01:00

  Note

  This feature requires C++20 <chrono> support. On older standards, timestamps are gracefully omitted.

📦 Integration (FetchContent)

Add the following to your CMakeLists.txt to integrate CppTrail seamlessly:

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
cpptrail
GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/DanteDomenech/cpptrail.git
GIT_TAG main
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(cpptrail)
 
# Link to the interface library
target_link_libraries(my_app PRIVATE CppTrail::cpptrail)

🚀 Quick Start

Asynchronous Console Logging

#include "cpptrail/ostream_logger.h"
 
int main() {
 
    // Instantiate logger
    CppTrail::CoutAsyncLogger log;
 
    Start logger
    log.start();
 
    // Log what you wish
    log.log(CppTrail::Level::INFO, "Monitoring the wire...");
 
    // Log an exception directly
    try {
        // ... network logic ...
    } catch (const std::exception& e) {
        log.log(e);
    }
 
    // Stop the logger (flushes everything before stopping)
    log.stop(); // Ensures all logs are flushed
 
    // All done!
    return 0;
}

🎓 Learning More

• To understand how to extend the library for your own needs:
• How to create custom loggers: 🛠️ Creating Custom Loggers *

👤 About us

Author

Dante Doménech Martínez

Copyright

GPL-3 License