CL-LOG - a general purpose logging utility

CL-LOG is a general purpose logging utility, loosely modelled in some respects after Gary King's Log5.

Its features include:

• logging to several destinations at once, via "messengers",
• each messenger is tailored to accept some log messages and reject others, and this tailoring can be changed on-the-fly,
• very rapid processing of messages which are rejected by all messengers,
• support for messengers which cl:format text to a stream,
• support for messengers which do not invoke cl:format,
• timestamps in theory accurate to internal-time-units-per-second.

Typically, logging utilities only support the one, simple paradigm of formatting objects to a text-stream. Removing this restriction allows you to:

• log random objects instead of plain text,
• generate internationalized log messages,
• create specialised binary logs,
• base the test-suite of complex applications around logging.

Logging is controlled by the following classes: log-manager, base-messenger, base-message; any of these might be specialised by your application. Whether or not a messenger will accept a given message is controlled by the "categories" of both the messenger and message; categories are logical combinations of atoms (typically keywords).

I'd expect CL-LOG to work as-is on any conforming implementation of Common Lisp. I've tested it on: ABCL, ACL, CCL, LW, SBCL.

CL-LOG is released with an MIT-style license.

Obtaining CL-LOG

CL-LOG consists of two source files: pkg.lisp and cl-log.lisp. An asdf definition is also provided.

There's also documentation which is very nearly the same length as the source, so it's up to you which you read.

Finally, you can download all four files in a bundle (gzipped tarball).

Problems? Suggestions? Derision?

Let me know.