Yesterday more or less completed the migration of my CPAN modules from using Log::Any to Log::ger. Sorry for the noise in the releases news channels due to the high number of my CPAN modules (particularly to Chase Whitener).

I did not have anything against Log::Any, to be honest. It was lightweight and so easy to use in modules as it encourages separation of log producers and consumers. Sure, I wish Log::Any had some features that I want but I was okay with using it for all my logging needs.

Until Log::Any 1.00 came along in late 2014, when its startup overhead jumped from ~2ms (version 0.15) to ~15ms. The new version ballooned from just loading strict, warnings, and Log::Any::Adapter::Null to over a dozen modules. Later versions of Log::Any improve somewhat on the startup overhead front but after the introduction of Log::Any::Proxy I thought it probably will not get back to the previous lightweight level. So I planned to write a more lightweight alternative along with probably implementing my wishlist. But this would require some time and in the mean time I wrote a hackish workaround called Log::Any::IfLOG that will load Log::Any only if environment variable like LOG or DEBUG or TRACE is set to true. I hated that workaround and regretted having created it.

By the way, why do I fuss over a few milliseconds? My major interest in using Perl is for building CLI applications. I am simply annoyed if my CLIs show a noticeable (~50-100ms or more) delay before responding with output (major offenders include Moose-based CLIs like dzil) when the fact is that Perl can be much more responsive than that. Log::Any is but one of several (sometimes many) modules I must load in a CLI so if a few ms is added here and a few more there, it could quickly add up. Also my CLIs feature shell tab completion and this is implemented by running the CLIs themselves for getting the completion answers so I always prefer responsive CLIs.

The recent Eid al-Fitr holiday finally made it possible for me to write a replacement for Log::Any: Log::ger in the course of a couple of weeks, along with all the log outputs and plugins to match all the features that I needed. So in what ways is Log::ger different than Log::Any or the other logger libraries?

First of all, for the low startup overhead goal, I've managed to keep use Log::ger having an overhead of just 0.5-1ms (without loading any extra modules). This is even less than use warnings and certainly less than use Log::Any (8-10ms) or the much heavier use Log::Log4perl ':easy' (35ms). This means, adding logging with Log::ger to your modules now incurs a negligible startup overhead. You can add logging to most of your modules without worrying about startup overhead.

What about null-logging (stealth-logging) overhead? Log::ger also manages to be the fastest here. It's about 1.5x faster than Log::Any, 3x faster than Log4perl, and 5x faster than Log::Fast (included here because the name claims something about speed). This is thanks to using procedural style logging ( log_warn("foo") ) instead of OO ( $log->warn("foo") ) and just using an empty subroutine sub {0} as the null default. If you don't want that tiny runtime overhead too, you can eliminate it with Log::ger::Plugin::OptAway. This plugin uses some B magic to turn your logging statements into a constant so they are removed during run-time.

As a bonus, due to the modular and flexible design of Log::ger, you can also: log using OO-style, use Log::Any style (method names and formatting rule), use Log::Log4perl style (method names and formatting rule), use Log::Contextual style (block style), or mimic other interface that you want. And mix different styles in different modules of your application. And as another bonus, writing a Log::ger output is also simpler and significantly shorter than writing a Log::Any adapter. Compare Log::Any::Adapter::Callback with Log::ger::Output::Callback, or Log::Any::Adapter::Syslog with Log::ger::Output::Syslog.

To keep this post short, instead of explaining how Log::ger works or the details of its features here I welcome you to look at the documentation.