[Boost-users] [regex] Static linking woes with gcc 4.0x on Fedora Core

From: David Yon (yon_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-05-22 15:05:01

I've been having great success with the regex library on Win32 and 
Linux, up until the time I decided to flip over to using all static 
linking.  What used to be working code suddenly goes belly-up during 
static constructor initialization, but only when I statically link.  
When I use dynamic-linking, all appears to be well.

I've tried the following permutations, each of which crashes, but each 
in a slightly different place:

- Stock Fedora Core 4 install, with gcc 4.0.0 and boost 1.32
- Upgrade the above to gcc 4.0.2
- Upgrade boost to boost-1.33.1-6.i386.rpm (+boost-devel)
- Build boost 1.33 from sources using gcc 4.0.2

When I started, it was dying when running static initializers inside the 
regex lib.  I don't have the exact stack trace right now, but it looked 
like c_regex_traits<char>::init() was calling a null function pointer 
somewhere (similar to the top frame shown below). But now that I've come 
to the last step, it's dying during exit(), with the following 
backtrace---which isn't terribly helpful, I know:

(gdb) backtrace
Core was generated by `trquery'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x00000000 in ?? ()
#1  0x08096f63 in __tcf_0 ()
#2  0x080fa5ee in exit ()
#3  0x08048d80 in DoQueryAll (ctl=@0xbfaf2a84, ttyname=0x0) at 
siquery.cpp:472
#4  0x08049826 in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfaf2ec4) at siquery.cpp:320

My DoQueryAll() is calling exit() directly, although I doubt that should 
make a difference.  And again, this All Just Works(tm) when I 
dynamically link.  Dynamic linking is not an option for us---if it came 
to that, then I'd be seriously looking at refactoring to replace 
boost.regex with either custom parsing or another regex lib.  Besides, 
bjam *does* build a libboost_regex-XXX.a, presumably it's supposed to 
work.  :-)

Now I know that based on the above backtrace, this could be anything.  
I'm suspecting boost because of the first symptom where the backtrace is 
in c_regex_traits<char>::init().

So given the dearth of discussion on this category of problem, I'm 
guessing that perhaps this is a problem with gcc 4.x?  Are there any 
known issues with boost.regex on gcc 4.0.x?  Are they fixed in 4.1?  
Should I just fall back to Fedora Core 3 to get gcc 3.x?

Thanks much!

David Yon
Tactical Software