Blog / Standard Library

Working with Records

May 18, 2026

In my experience, it’s rare you’ll need to worry about slog Records, unless you’re writing a Handler, or some kind of middleware/transform. But even if you never need to manipulate a Record directly, understanding the concept can be useful.

Working with Records

Sometimes a Handler will need to modify a Record before passing it on to another Handler or backend. A Record contains a mixture of simple public fields (e.g. Time, Level, Message) and hidden fields that refer to state (such as attributes) indirectly. This means that modifying a simple copy of a Record (e.g. by calling Record.Add or Record.AddAttrs to add attributes) may have unexpected effects on the original. Before modifying a Record, use Record.Clone to create a copy that shares no state with the original, or create a new Record with NewRecord and build up its Attrs by traversing the old ones with Record.Attrs.

TL;DR; don’t copy records! Clone them, either direction (Record.Clone) or indeirectly!

We’ll look into the nitty gritty details of Records later on.

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