Optical directed logic (DL) is a novel logic operation scheme that employs electrical signals as operands to control the working states of optical switches to perform the logic functions. This review first provides an overview of the concept and working principle of DL. The developing trends of DL computing are then discussed in detail, including the fundamental optical DL gates, combinational optical DL operations, reconfigurable logic computing, low power optical logic computing, and programmable photonic network. The concluding remarks provide an outlook on the DL future development and its impacts in optical computing.