It uses the same construct as VLOG above does, which allows you to << an error string into CRASH_UNLESS and VLOG. The weirdness comes in when you want to condi

It uses the same construct as VLOG above does, which allows you to << an error string into CRASH_UNLESS and VLOG. The weirdness comes in when you want to conditionalize the log stream, which isn't implemented in the stubs here. The real Google logging classes are probably more sophisticated, and this is just a shim to get the snappy code to work unchanged. Specifically the answer to your question is that printing in the destructor is there to print a newline right before calling abort but after having printed whatever was <<'ed to CRASH_UNLESS. Check out libjingle's logging implementation which has some similar weirdness in it: http://code.google.com/p/libjingle/source/browse/trunk/talk/base/logging.h http://code.google.com/p/libjingle/source/browse/trunk/talk/...