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";