I think John's approach is minimally intrusive and the usage of iostreams makes it pretty much impossible to mess anything up.
I'm sure he can come up with a way that it can be used without macro as well (e.g. perhaps a boost::log method). As it stands now, it can be done but you'd be stuck with lines like:
*(boost::log::log_id<log_stream_logid_type>::unique_id().m_stream) << some_message;
Which is a lot harder to type than BOOST_LOG(log_stream) :-)
I am not a fan of macros, and avoid them where possible, but I think they are the least painful solution to a problem like this one.
The main reason for requiring a macro was for efficiency, so that logging statements could easily be disabled. No matter what, you'll somehow need to do something like: // equivalent of: BOOST_LOG (some_log) << the << things << to << output; if ( is_enabled(some_log)) some_log << the << things << to << output; Which to me seems tedious and you can easily forget to write that. Best, John -- John Torjo, Contributing editor, C/C++ Users Journal -- "Win32 GUI Generics" -- generics & GUI do mix, after all -- http://www.torjo.com/win32gui/ -- v1.5 - tooltips at your fingertips (work for menus too!) + bitmap buttons (work for MessageBox too!) + tab dialogs, hyper links, lite html