Logging facilities and Qt

Existing C++ logging libraries are too heavy for my tastes, so I have created a custom front-end based on ideas from Logging in C++ for the Qt qInstallMsgHandlerq back-end. It's cross-platform and thread-safe. Someday I'll clean up the code and release it to the world :)

An interesting alternative for Qt is QxtLogger.

Since Qt 5.2 supports categorized logging: http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5/qloggingcategory.html . This allows you to split up your logging messages into a (hierarchy of) categories, and fine tune which is logged, and what not.

If you are just working in a single thread, qDebug and such work pretty well, or you can modify them somewhat by installing your own handler with qInstallMessageHandler in QT 5.0+, or qInstallMsgHandler in old versions.

Note: Older versions of qDebug() etc., where you used qInstallMsgHandler (now deprecated, e.g. http://doc.qt.io/archives/4.6/qtglobal.html#qDebug) were not thread-safe. If you use threads, they would crash/break badly. Internally it was using QTextStream, which was reentrant, but not thread-safe.