[vtk-developers] Proposal to add "vtkInfoMacro"

[David Gobbi]

On the one hand, I can see that it is useful to have a message macro that
doesn't require a debug build.  In my own apps, I often write app-specific
classes that are derived from vtkObject and this is a macro that I might
use from time to time.  Unlike Berk, I'm not all that worried that it might
be abused.  For VTK, we have code review.

On the other hand, I don't think we have a use case for this within VTK
itself, it would be there purely to serve external VTK classes and apps.
And people who need this feature could simply put this macro (or a similar
one) in their own header files.

Summary: this is a convenience feature, IMHO a mostly harmless one, and one
that I might use.

 - David


On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 6:27 AM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com>
wrote:

> I disagree with this change. There is no compelling VTK specific example
> for why this is needed. The examples are all from Slicer - which to me says
> that they can be implemented in Slicer.
>
> Adding a logging functionality without clear guidelines on how to use it
> is dangerous. It can lead to folks using it for debugging in performance
> critical sections and since it is not compiled out in Release builds, it
> can lead to significant performance issues, specially in multi-threaded
> code. As it is, there are lot of minor issues like this that we will have
> to go and clean up (progress being one of them).
>
> The main use case seems to be tracking interaction/workflow changes. My
> suggestion is to employ a method appropriate to that. For example, events
> and listeners.
>
> Best,
> -berk
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 11, 2014 at 12:06 PM, Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin <
> jchris.fillionr at kitware.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> While developing 3D Slicer, we created a macro named
>>
>>                                           vtkInfoMacro
>>
>> similar to "vtkErrorMacro/vtkDebugMacro/vtkWarningMacro".
>>
>>
>> We would like to contribute it back to VTK core.
>>
>>
>>
>> The associated topic is:
>>
>>                       http://review.source.kitware.com/#/c/18385/
>>
>>
>> It would be great to get feedback before moving forward.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Jc
>>
>
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