macos statically linking libstdc++ with g++ 4.7.2

Question

I've been looking at this issue for a number of weeks now with no joy so its time to ask for the wisdom of stack overflow...

For various reasons I need to link libstdc++ into my executable so it has no extra dependencies. Using g++'s -static-libstdc++ and -static-libgcc flags I was able to achieve this, however, no exceptions were being caught.

I produced the following test code to investigate the problem further. It seems the code works when I compile in 32 mode but not in 64 bit. I do not understand why the exception is not being caught and its rather frustrating.

Setup

• Macos 10.7 64 bit
• G++ 4.7.2

The proram

#include <cstdio>
#include <stdexcept>

void myMethod() {
    throw std::invalid_argument("foo");
}

int main () {
    try {
            myMethod();
    } catch (const std::invalid_argument& ex) {
            printf("caught: %s\n", ex.what());
    } catch (...) {
            printf("caught it\n");
    }
    return 0;
}

32 bit mode

$ g++ -m32 -o main Main.cpp -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ && otool -L ./main && ./main
    ./main:
 /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)
 caught: foo

64 bit mode

$ g++ -o main Main.cpp -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ && otool -L ./main && ./main
    ./main:
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 159.1.0)
Abort trap: 6

I have tried many different methods to try to solve this problem including:

• Linking directly with the static libraries ie /usr/local/lib/libstdc++.a
• Using -Wl,-bstatic -lstdc++ -lgcc_eh -bdynamic

But no avail.

Is there some part of the compiler configuration I need to check? A flag I'm missing?

I know mac stopped supporting g++ at version 4.2.1 so it might be better to move over to using clang and hoping the binary still works on different versions of OSX.

Answer 1

I think exceptions are a bit broken with GCC on Mac OS X:

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=45486
http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42159