[viraptor]

I'd disagree with 2 and 4.

2. Given a large enough system you will encounter situations where the only action you can take is to log "this really shouldn't happen" and try to roll back as cleanly as possible. This may be due to either complexity or a bug manifesting in a layer completely different than where it occurred (I've seen a null reference crash on "if(foo) foo->bar();" in the past)

4. I believe loggers should ideally know as little as possible about your logs. Logs can be rotated externally, can be buffered and sent to other hosts without touching the disk, can be ignored. Ideall, the system should care, not the app.

[mmkos]

> I've seen a null reference crash on "if(foo) foo->bar();" in the past

References can't be null. Regardless, that's a valid check for a null pointer and I don't think what you wrote is at all possible (unless maybe in some multithreaded scenario?).