Debugging Trick Using Variadic Macros in C and C++

Following you can find a very practical trick that allows you to enable/disable all prints to the screen with as little effort as possible while not dramatically increasing the overall code size to do this.

For C:  Place on the top of your code or on a header file the following:

#define ENABLE_DEBUG

#ifdef ENABLE_DEBUG
    #define XDEBUG(...) printf(__VA_ARGS__)
#else
    #define XDEBUG(...)  /**/
#endif

and then inside the code whenever you want to print some debug information do as follows:

XDEBUG("Max Weight %d, Total Trips %d\n", minMax, trips);

For C++:  Place on the top of your code or on a header file the following:

#define ENABLE_DEBUG

#ifdef ENABLE_DEBUG
    #define XDEBUG cout
#else
    #define XDEBUG if(0) cerr
#endif

and then inside the code whenever you want to print some debug information do as follows:

XDEBUG << "We got " << disks << " disks\n";

C/C++: Perform safe sprintf

The following function accepts the address of a char * buffer, the formatting string for printf along with all the parameters needed to fill the formatting string and updates the location of the buffer to point at the final formatted string. [download id="2418"] This code does not require the user…

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C/C++: Full example of using C code in a C++ project

The following set of code present a fully functioning example of using a simple C library as part of a CPP based project to print on screen. [download id="2434"] The trick relies on encapsulating the C header definitions in the extern "C" declaration. extern "C" will make all function and…

7 December 2016

In "C"

C/C++: Full example of using C++ code in a C project

The following set of code present a fully functioning example of using a simple CPP library as part of a C based project to print on screen. [download id="2428"] The trick relies on encapsulating the CPP header definitions in the extern "C" declaration. extern "C" will make all function and…

7 December 2016

In "C"

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