HN Reader

1) If you're writing a library that can be used by many different applications and want to emit logs, you'll still need to write a generic log interface with adapters for slog, zap, charmlog, etc. That the golang team refuses to bless a single interface for everyone to settle on both makes sense given their ideological standpoint on shipping interfaces and also causes endless mild annoyance and code duplication.

2) I believe it's still impossible to see the correct callsite in test logs when using slog as the logger. For more information, see https://github.com/neilotoole/slogt?tab=readme-ov-file#defic.... It's possible I'm out of date here — please correct me if this is wrong, it's actually a much larger annoyance for me and one of the reasons I still use uber/zap or charmbracelet/log.

Overall, especially given that it performs worse than uber/zap and everyone has basically standardized on that and it provides essentially the same interface, I recommend using uber/zap instead.

EDIT: just to expand further, take a look at the recommended method of wrapping helper methods that call logs. Compare to the `t.Helper()` approach. And some previous discussion. Frustrating!

- https://pkg.go.dev/log/slog#example-package-Wrapping

- https://github.com/golang/go/issues/59145#issuecomment-14770...

Curious how different people handle this. I personally pretty much always pass a logger into function, classes, structs (what have you) so it has the context I need it to. It's a tad more verbose I guess, but it's such a minor lift I've always found it worth it.

One could argue that supported types are the ones provided by Attr "construct" functions (like slog.String, slog.Duration, etc), but it is not enough. For example, there is no function for int32 – does it mean it is not supported? Then there is slog.Any and some support in some handlers for error and fmt.Stringer interfaces. The end result is a bit of a mess.

The fact it is so flexible and composable, while still maintaining a simple API is just great design. I wasn't aware of the performance overhead compared to something like zerolog, but this shouldn't be a concern for most applications.

I really like structured logs and am pleased the Go team saw the benefits of bringing it into the standard library.

However, I feel like errors should be able to hold slog attributes. It makes for some very useful and easy error logging, especially when the logging takes place far up the execution chain from where the error happened.

This is easily possible with a custom error type and some log functions. I have published on GitHub my small and crude implementation that I use in a few hobby projects, MIT licensed, if anyone is interested. https://github.com/sveinnthorarins/sterlo

What I mean is, if you configure slog in (say) your main package, then, by magic, that config is used by any call to slog within your application.

There's no "Oh you are using this instance of slog that has been configured to have this behaviour" - it's "Oh slog got configured so that's the config you have been given"

I've never tried to see if I can split configs up, and I don't have a usecase, it just strikes me as magic is all

I especially appreciated the section on slog.Attr and the !BADKEY issue, it’s one of those little things that can go unnoticed until logs break in prod.

Thanks for putting this together!

I take their point, but given the typical value of most logging lines, this does not seem worth the tax you pay in readability. This is a gripe I have with oTel too --- it really cruds your code up --- but with oTel you're getting long-term value that logging (which is still my go-to o11y) doesn't.