A fundamental way of debugging an application, especially developed using C / C++ programming languages is "printf debugging". i.e. To dump a message on to console output with some variables.
However, including too many "printf debugging" statements can hinder the performance of an application. Therefore, it is important to include a mechanism to automatically remove all such debugging statements. The easiest way to achieve this is through conditional compilations.
One straight forward way is to wrap the printf statements within a preprocessor directive as follows.
#ifdef _DEBUG
printf("Debug message\n");
#endif
This approach adds too much clutter into the source code. Therefore, I was looking for a elegant solution to this fundamental problem and came across the following code block.
