Global Tracer Object

Some features in VizTracer requires a VizTracer object so it’s helpful to make the tracer object accessible globally.

When you are using command line entry viztracer your_script.py, you don’t need to worry about it. The tracer will be automatically registered and you can access it from any file.

When you are using inline script, after you instantiate the object like tracer = VizTracer(), it will be automatically registered globally. It is not recommended to have multiple tracer objects in a single script. However, you can turn off the global register by tracer = VizTracer(register_global=False)

To access the tracer, do

from viztracer import get_tracer
# get_tracer() will return None if no tracer is registered
tracer = get_tracer()

When you use VizLoggingHandler or VizCounter or VizObject, setting their tracer to None will make the logging a NOP. This will enable you to leave the instrumentation code as it is and run you program both regularly and with viztracer

You can do things like:

from viztracer import VizLoggingHandler, get_tracer

handler = VizLoggingHandler()

handler.setTracer(get_tracer())

from viztracer import get_tracer, VizObject

obj = VizObject(get_tracer(), "my variable")