Improve rendering of pointers to structs inside of slices and maps #186
Description
Description
It would be great to be able to render pointers to structs contained inside slices and maps better.
This could be done either by an improved rendering by default or through some way to configure the way that attributes are rendered.
I wrote a simple helper to compare devslog, log, slog with text formatter and slog with json formatter:
go run telnesstech.com/cmd
[13:58:41] INFO devslog
S slice: 1 []*main.testingStruct
0: *main.testingStruct
Name: slice1
S ptr : *main.testingStruct
Name: test
M map : 1 map[string]*main.testingStruct
key: main.testingStruct
Name: test
2025/09/26 13:58:41 INFO charmbracelet/log slice=[0x140001260c0] ptr=&{Name:test} map=map[key:0x140001260e0]
time=2025-09-26T13:58:41.584+02:00 level=INFO msg=slog slice=[0x140001260c0] ptr=&{Name:test} map=map[key:0x140001260e0]
{"time":"2025-09-26T13:58:41.584822+02:00","level":"INFO","msg":"slog","slice":[{"Name":"slice1"}],"ptr":{"Name":"test"},"map":{"key":{"Name":"test"}}}
devslog does this by default which is very useful, especially as it mirrors what is likely to mirror the production-behavior when using json formatter. The relevant code from devslogs starts around here.
Another alternative would also be to have an option similar to slog's ReplaceAttr to allow the user themselves to configure how attributes are rendered, making this possible to implement yourself.
Code to print the demo above.
package main
import (
"log/slog"
"os"
"github.com/charmbracelet/log"
"github.com/golang-cz/devslog"
)
func main() {
slice := []*testingStruct{{Name: "slice1"}}
ptr := &testingStruct{Name: "test"}
m := map[string]*testingStruct{"key": {Name: "test"}}
slog.New(devslog.NewHandler(os.Stdout, nil)).With("slice", slice, "ptr", ptr, "map", m).Info("devslog")
log.With("slice", slice, "ptr", ptr, "map", m).Info("charmbracelet/slog")
slog.New(slog.NewTextHandler(os.Stdout, nil)).With("slice", slice, "ptr", ptr, "map", m).Info("slog")
slog.New(slog.NewJSONHandler(os.Stdout, nil)).With("slice", slice, "ptr", ptr, "map", m).Info("slog")
}
type testingStruct struct {
Name string
}