In this post Marco reviews and improves upon a debug stream implementation that builds on the standard IOstream classes, touching on the separation of concerns built into this area of the C++ standard.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine coded an output stream that outputted strings through Win32 OutputDebugString function (you can use DebugView to monitor these kind of traces). His implementation had two main problems:
- it was designed quite poorly (as you’ll see in a while),
- it didn’t allow a real formatting.
With the second point I mean: everytime operator<<(stream&, something) was called, something was sent to OutputDebugString. I paste here a facsimile of his code:
What I mostly dislike of this code is the design choice to inherit from std::ostringstream, being forced to override operator<< as the only (simple) option to print something to the DebugView. This makes things even more difficult when you have to preserve formatting rules. The preferable choice would be storing stuff until they need to be outputted to DebugView (e.g. when std::endl is used).
I suggested him to change his point of…
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The other branch 