Strip debug msg function calls during build

pulsar · ‎2024-11-04

I have a bunch of debugMsg() calls throughout my code. Is there a way to automatically strip those out during a build?

Andrew Neil · ‎2024-11-05

The usual way is to have something like:

#if defined DEBUG
#define debugMsg(x) output_stuff(x)
#else
#define debugMsg(x) 
#endif

thus debugMsg() effectively "disappears" in non-DEBUG builds.

This is general C practice - not specific to STM32 or CubeIDE.

Addendum:

Variadic macros became a standard part of the C language with C99 (and GCC had proprietary support before that).

This lets you do, for example:

#if defined DEBUG
#define debugMsg(...) printf( __VA_ARGS__ )
#else
#define debugMsg(...) 
#endif

Before that, there were tricks like this:

#ifdef DEBUG
# define DEBUG_PRINT(x) printf x
#else
# define DEBUG_PRINT(x)
#endif

To use that DEBUG_PRINT macro, you had to add extra parentheses; eg,

DEBUG_PRINT(("var1: %d; var2: %d; str: %s\n", var1, var2, str));