Warning Lots of performance tuning has yet to be done! Due to the nature of the library, care will be taken to ensure that all of the hot path code will be as performant as possible. This will take some time.

Sawmill is a framework for instrumenting C++ applications to collect structured event-based diagnostic information, much in the same way that the tokio tracing library does for rust.

Comprehensive documentation about sawmill and its usage can be found at https://lethalbit.github.io/sawmill/.

The following steps describe how to build Sawmill, it should be consistent for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but macOS and Windows remain untested.

To build Sawmill, ensure you have the following build time dependencies:

• git
• meson
• ninja
• g++ >= 11 or clang++ >= 11

Optionally, when also building with binding support (which is the default) you also need:

• python >= 3.9
• pybind11 >= 2.7.0

You can build sawmill with the default options, all of which can be found in meson_options.txt. You can change these by specifying -D<OPTION_NAME>=<VALUE> at initial meson invocation time, or with meson configure in the build directory post initial configure.

To change the install prefix, which is /usr/local by default ensure to pass --prefix <PREFIX> when running meson for the first time.

In either case, simply running meson build from the root of the repository will be sufficient and place all of the build files in the build subdirectory.

Once you have configured sawmill appropriately, to simply build and install simply run the following:

$ ninja -C build
$ ninja -C build test # Optional: Run Tests
$ ninja -C build install

This will build and install Sawmill into the default prefix which is /usr/local, to change that see the configuration steps above.

If you are building sawmill for inclusion in a distributions package system then ensure to set DESTDIR prior to running meson install.

There is also a bugreport_url configuration option that is set to this repositories issues tracker by default, it is recommended to change it to your distributions bug tracking page.

Sawmill is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause license, the full text of which can be found in the LICENSE file.