I've never been a fan of the setup of logging frameworks as far back as when I was a Java developer.  The hassle and complexity of configuring and managing the logging framework was always a big hassle and would often create serious problems in the application if not done right.  Even today in Scala it doesn't feel much better.  Certainly we have Macros that give some additional compile-time optimizations, but it's amazing how little has changed.

A while back I created a Scala logging framework called Scribe.  Honestly, the primary reason had more to do with giving greater flexibility to control configuration in code over performance or anything else.  However, by not building on top of log4j, logback, slf4j, or JUL, I found that the system was not only far more simplistic and configurable, but it was also faster.

I recently did a comparison between Lightbend's Scala Logging framework to see how it performs.  Without any additional optimizations the results were pretty impressive.  I configured both Scribe and Scala Logging to avoid writing to standard out as that would be the primary bottleneck of performance and simply wrote a custom Writer / Appender that would simply count the log entries:

Over sixty seconds I recorded how many records could be logged.  Scala Logging was able to log 474k records and Scribe was able to log 610k.  Now, obviously this is far more logging than any reasonable application should be doing, but the point was to prove that not only can Scribe keep up with the most popular Scala logging framework (Scala Logging) on top of the most popular Java logging framework (Logback), but it quite a bit faster.

The second thing I measured was memory consumption over the run.  Memory usage is a very important factor with regard to logging as it should have a very small footprint to give maximum allocation to the application itself.  Again, my finding were pretty strongly in favor of Scribe:

While Scala Logging utilized 704kb of memory Scribe utilized on 596kb.  Again, not a substantial difference when we're discussing hundreds of thousands of records being logged, but this is meant to prove that Scribe is the better performer.

Very often I hear that a developer won't use a framework because there aren't enough developers using it.  Obviously this creates a chicken / egg situation as you can't get developers using it because not enough developers use it.

Hopefully this short post will give some additionally credibility to the value of Scribe that people will start comparing features and see just how much it has to offer.  If there's something missing that your existing logging framework has, just create a ticket.

To my relatively small number of followers, it should come as no surprise that my biggest failing is actually getting much visibility for my vast number of open-source projects I write.  To that end I've been doing some research and asking other developers to give me some suggestions on how to get more visibility for me projects.  I've made it a goal for this year to get more visibility for my open-source projects so they will hopefully reach a larger audience.

I decided that I would post the results of my research in a blog post so hopefully others can benefit from this research as well, or at least I can have an easy place to reference back to it for myself.

Speaking / Conferences

The most common suggestion for visibility for a project was speaking about it both in local groups and at conferences.  Several developers said that's how they learned about a useful framework they are using.  This is a good idea and something I'm planning on doing more of this year, even though I really prefer to write code than talk about it, but this is a bit of a longer-term objective than immediate visibility.

Awesome

There are lots of "awesome" lists. Often more than one for each language. This is a no-brainer presuming you can get someone to merge your pull request: https://github.com/bayandin/awesome-awesomeness

Reddit

Apparently there are people that use that site and a common source of information for developers.  I must admit, I haven't been a big user, and this is something I think is going to have to change.  I'll have to get involved in the Scala group and reference my projects there.

Twitter

Yet another thing I am terrible about not keeping up with.  For a very long time I simply had all of my GitHub commits logging to Twitter, but I'm thinking that personalized messages on Twitter with relevant hashtags might be a very good way to get my projects noticed.  Many developers I talked to get most of their news and information from Twitter.

Mailing Lists

Though a bit old-school, this is something a lot of developers still follow and perhaps a good way to get visibility directly into people's inbox of a new framework that should be using.

Based on this research it's clear that my aversion to social media has a direct correlation to my difficulty in getting visibility for my projects.  Shocking right?  I suppose the moral of the story is, if you don't like people, don't expect them to like you either.