G'day all,

Simple question. When I compile my applications against the lcl, is there an easy way to compile out all the various debugln() calls?

I had a cursory look at lcl/lclproc.pas where they are defined, but nothing obvious jumped out at me. If the debugln() routines were re-defined to empty procedures, would the compiler optimise the calls away and not compile in all the text strings also?

2 Reasons for this. First is space. I was simply interested in seeing how much space this stuff consumed.

Second is noise on the console when the applications are running. Synedit in particular is quite picky about its unicode characters, and can get quite noisy when invalid combinations are fed to it, although it appears to cope quite well.

Regards,
Brad

Hello Brad,

I'm also interested on this, and would like to contribute with some thoughts. First, I have tried to remove all the debugln() and similar calls from the LCL, but it's a lot of work manually... it's not as simple as recursive search and replace. I have found that removing a few of them reduces the .exe size a few kilobytes (compiling with strip symbols), not much, but enough to be considered. Some objects have custom debug routines implemented with loops, and text formatting, which is time and space consuming. Many of the debug calls are wrapped by compiler conditionals, but many of them are not. Also compiler conditional differ from unit to unit, if a global debug conditional were used enabling/disabling debug calls would be easier. I have thought about creating an automatic tool to strip all debug calls from the LCL (or to wrap them), but the task doesn't seem simple.

Regards!
-Marco

2010/1/19 Brad Campbell :