Slow Progress on Multi-Threading Suneido

Last time I worked on this I had just reached the point where I could successfully compile and link. I resisted the temptation to try running it because I figured there were bound to be problems.

Sure enough, I run it ... and it crashes with a memory fault. No big surprise. I put in a few print's to see where it's getting to. Hmmm ... it's not even getting to my main!?

Download and install MinGW GDB and use it to find it's crashing in the garbage collector code. I am redefining operator new to use the garbage collector so presumably something is calling operator new during static initialization. I comment out my redefinition and it works. I make a tiny test program:

#include "include/gc.h"

void* stat = GC_malloc(10);

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
return 0;
}

It crashes. But this works in the current version of Suneido. It must be thread related. Yup, my test program runs fine without threads. Now what?

I search the web to see if this is a known problem but I don't find anything.

I'm still using gc-6.5 and the notes for the latest gc-7.0 mention improvements to win32 threads.

So I download gc-7.0 The readme says MinGW is not well tested/supported - ugh. For gc-6.5 I had ended up writing my own makefile but I'd prefer to avoid that. The recommended approach seems to be the standard configure & make so I try this with MinGW MSys.

configure seems to succeed, at least with no obvious errors, but make fails with a bunch of "undefined references". It appears to be trying to make a dll which I don't want - I want a static library. Eventually I hit on configure --enable-shared=0 which avoids the dll stuff but still gives a bunch of "undefined references". This time they all appear to be from win32_threads.c For some reason this isn't getting included in the build. I uncomment am__objects_3 = win32_threads.lo in the generated Makefile to fix this. That's probably not the correct solution but it does the trick and I finally get the build to succeed. gctest runs successfully although it seems slower and in the output the heap is twice as big as with gc-6.5 - not good, but I'll worry about it later!

Thankfully this effort wasn't wasted and my test program runs successfully. And Suneido now manages to get to main! But then it fails with ACE errors saying WSA Startup isn't initialized. This is easily fixed by adding ACE::Init but it's strange because I didn't need it in my previous ACE test program.

After most of a day's work I'm finally back to where I can start debugging my own code! It's great to be able to leverage other people's work (like the Boehm GC and ACE) but it can be extremely frustrating when they don't work and you don't have a clue what's going on. Even the standard configure & make has the same problem. If it works it's great, but if it doesn't you're faced with incomprehensible makefile's.