Re: [Boost-users] boost in a mixed CLR assemby

From: John Dunn (john_dunn_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-09 18:44:23

Daniel J. Kelly wrote:
> I realize it is not officially supported, but has anyone had success 
> using boost libraries in a mixed CLR assembly? I am using visual studio 
> 2005. I have been trying to accomplish this in an applicatation that has 
> a Windows Forms front end, whose enire back end is build of libraries 
> written in standard C++, making extensive use of boost, especially smart 
> pointers and threads.
>  
> The specific problem I am having involved initializing static 
> variables.  For instance, I have a global variable:
>     boost::mutex osmutex;
> The program compiles and links fine, but during static initialization, I 
> receive an error indicating _CrtIsValidHeapPointer(pUserData) is 
> invalid. Looking at the stack unwind, the calling code is the "dynamic 
> initializer for 'osmutex'".  My suspicion is that the boost library is 
> linking to a different run time library than my mixed code, and that the 
> pointer being rejected is happening as a result of it coming from a 
> different heap.
>  
> I would like try to check this hypothesis by building boost forcing it 
> to link to the correct C++ runtime library used by mixed assemblies 
> (msvcmrtd.dll), but I am not familar enough with the boost build system 
> to do this. 

Linking to the static version of boost::threads causes problems if you compile 
with /clr. I believe this behavior was introduced with Visual Studio 2005 SP1. I 
reported the issue both here ( search gmane archive ) and to Microsoft Connect. 
Neither party seemed too interested in addressing the issue. A workaround is to 
use the dynamic version of boost::threads ( #define BOOST_THREAD_USE_DLL ). Of 
course then you have to cart around another DLL but it does appear to fix the 
problem.

John