Same output, less pain — reimplementing the LoggerMessage generator.

[h-shahzaib]

Hey folks 👋

So I recently tried reimplementing the LoggerMessage-based source generator from Microsoft.Extensions.Logging — not to change the actual behavior, but just to explore a different structure that’s a bit easier to work with.

The original implementation is super optimized and works fine as-is — but honestly, it's kinda hard to follow in places. You've got a lot of manual indentation tracking, raw strings with spacing baked in, and logic that's all tangled up with formatting.

I ended up rebuilding the whole thing using a small library I’ve been working on called Nest. It's basically a lightweight abstraction over StringBuilder for structured text/code generation — helps with nesting, indentation, conditionals etc. without needing to juggle these directly.

Anyway, here’s the repo:

🔗 NestVsMsLogger

This includes both:

• MsLogger — the same as the current impl (uses StringBuilder)
• NestLogger — same output, but built using Nest

Both produce identical output (aside from maybe a few newlines or spaces). You can check the Output/ folder and tests for that.

Why I'm sharing this:

Not proposing we change anything right now — this is more of an experiment. Just wondering if there's room to discuss whether using a more composable/text-builder style approach would help make these kinds of generators easier to reason about or maintain long-term.

Things like:

• Better separation of formatting and logic
• Easier testing of small pieces in isolation
• Less stress managing indentation/nesting manually

Would love to hear thoughts — even if it's just "nah, not worth it." I'm curious what others think of this kind of setup.

Thanks for reading, and also just — thanks for the incredible work on this whole ecosystem. ❤️