Debugging Tools

Beyond the governor and crash handlers, the toolkit includes three more single-header tools.

Rich-style logging (debug_log.h)

Beautiful terminal logging inspired by Python’s Rich library:

• Colored log levels — INFO (cyan), WARN (yellow), ERROR (red)
• Box-drawing characters — visual section boundaries with Unicode
• Automatic timing — sections show elapsed time on completion
• Correlation IDs — track related log entries across threads
• Multiple formats — Rich (colored), Text (plain), JSON (machine-parseable)

Use Windows Terminal or a terminal with VT/ANSI support for full color output.

Minidump generation (minidump.h)

Automatic crash dump capture:

• Full memory dumps for post-mortem debugging
• Configurable dump location
• Automatic cleanup of old dumps

Minidumps can be loaded in Visual Studio or WinDbg for detailed analysis.

Build information (build_info.h)

Captures comprehensive build and system info:

Category	What it captures
Toolkit	Version string
Git	Commit hash, branch, dirty status
Compiler	Name and version (e.g., MSVC 1944)
Build	Date, time, architecture (x64/x86)
System	Windows version, build number
Hardware	CPU model, core count, total memory

Demo

Run the included demo to see everything in action:

cd examples
cl /EHsc /Zi /utf-8 test_crash.cpp /link dbghelp.lib shell32.lib

test_crash.exe 6    # Rich-style logging demo
test_crash.exe 7    # Build & system info only
test_crash.exe 1    # Trigger bad_alloc crash with full report