Re: proposal for ICU tracing

Andy,

There is a speed advantage to the wrapper approach if it can be turned on for
some callers and not others, compared to the "on for all/off for all approach"
of putting it in the lower layers.
The speed cost is more than the if statement, as it includes the logging of
calls the user is not interested in- so there is the cost of logging and the
cost of filtering or sorting thru the uninteresting data.

I didn't mean to imply user requirements have not been looked at at all, as 
much as the longer term picture be evaluated instead of just the near term
requirements.

Please give some consideration to approaches that allow more selective tracing.

tex

Andy Heninger wrote:
> 
> Tex Texin wrote:
> 
> > It's not clear to me why tracing for collation is provided but not the other
> > api, especially if it is as low cost as indicated.
> 
> Tracing is going into collation first because we have collation users
> who require it.  It may be in at least some additional parts of ICU for
> 2.8, and, if successful, may grow from there.
> 
> > On the other hand, it would seem that a long term plan should be in place as
> > well as an assessment of user requirements for tracing, so that any overhead
> > can be justified by the need and unnecessary overhead clearly eliminated.
> 
> Tracing is definitely driven primarily by user requirements.
> 
> The overhead of supporting it is something that needs careful attention,
>   particularly because some very critical functions will be traced -
> strcoll(), for example.   Tracing by using wrapper functions or macros
> is another possibility, but looks to be more complicated for the user,
> with  little if any speed advantage over the approach taken.  And, all
> tracing code can be compiled out with either approach, if no tracing at
> all is wanted.
> 
>    -- Andy Heninger
>       [email protected]
> 
> _______________________________________________
> icu mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://oss.software.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/mailman/listinfo/icu

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:[email protected]
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
XenCraft		            http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------