switching between debugging and production mode

Question

As a fast way of debugging app while developing is writing a statement like:

print($data)

is there is a way to stop printing when switching to production mode so it will not affect the performance of the app?

a boolean as a switch for example?

Answer 1

You can use debugPrint instead of print for dev only logging

debugPrint(data)

debugPrint implementation can be made to change between environment. For instance in your main you can do:

void main() {
  bool isInRelease = true;

  assert(() { isInRelease = false; return true; }());

  if (isInRelease) {
    debugPrint = (String? message, { int? wrapWidth }) {};
  }
}

This will replace the implementation of debugPrint with something that does nothing in release

Answer 2

https://docs.flutter.io/flutter/foundation/debugPrint.html would allow this. The docs don't tell if it prints in production mode, but you could run different main() that assigns a no-op function to debugPrint.

Another way would be to use How do I build different versions of my Flutter app for qa/dev/prod? or the assert trick Does Flutter remove debug-mode code when compiling for release? to override debugPrint