Fun with debug macros

I recently introduced some new macros for doing assertions and conditional tracing, which was inspired by a conversation on llvm-dev. Here's how the new macro is used:

DASSERT(super != NULL) << "Expecting a non-null super class for type: " << type;

In other words, the assertion macro acts like a stream operator, allowing you to print a message that includes dynamic fields. There's also a DMSG(condition) macro which prints a message only if 'condition' is true.

DMSG(TRACE_CODEGEN) << "Adding a static root entry for: " << var;

One feature that DASSERT and DMSG have is that, like all good debugging macros, they impose no cost when disabled. This means that (a) no side effects occur if the condition is false, and (b) if the condition is both false and is a compile-time constant, the compiler should remove the message code entirely.

How does this work? Well, the DMSG and DASSERT macros construct a stream object. In the case of DMSG it's a generic output stream. In the case of DASSERT, it's a subclass of stream which calls abort() in it's destructor. Because the stream is a temporary object, it gets destructed at the end of the statement, after all of the messages have been printed.

Here's what DASSERT actually looks like:

#define DASSERT(expression) \

(expression) ? (void)0 : Diagnostics::VoidResult() & \

Diagnostics::AssertionFailureStream(#expression, __FILE__, __LINE__)

Let's start with the last part. AssertionFailureStream is the stream object - it's the right-most token in the macro, so any stream operators (<<) that come after the macro will be applied to the stream.

In the middle there's a C ternary operator '?:' which tests if 'expression' is true. Because the precedence of the ternary operator is lower than <<, the stream operators will get applied to the stream object, rather than the expression as a whole. Also, C++ guarantees that only one of the two choices of a ternary operator will be evaluated, so this means that the stream object will not be constructed, nor will the stream operators be executed, if 'expression' is true.

One catch is that both sides of a ternary expression have to be the same type - which in this case we want to be 'void'. Doing this requires another trick: pick some binary operator which has a lower precedence than << but higher than '?'. In this case, I've chosen the bitwise 'and' operator, '&'. Then create an overload for it which returns a void result:

/** Transforms a value of stream type into a void result. */

friend void operator&(const VoidResult &, const FormatStream &) {}

'VoidResult is just an empty struct - it's just there to insure that our operator gets called. So 'VoidResult() & AssertionFailureStream(...)' now has type void.

One final thing needed to make this all work is to define appropriate stream operators for various compiler classes such as Variable and Type, which print out the object in human-readable form.