mingw program crashes when throwing exception inside secondary thread

[Elkvis]

I have a windows service that I am working on, and it crashes any time I throw any kind of exception from a secondary thread (not the main thread). I googled for at least a half hour looking for the answer to this, but found nothing. I am compiling with the -mthreads command line option, which is supposed to help, but it makes no difference. I have now spent about 3 hours on this problem alone, and I absolutely cannot move on until it is resolved, as the remainder of my program will use exceptions, and must not crash.

Edit:
GCC 3.4.5
windows threading API functions _beginthreadex, etc
windows XP Pro x64

[bithub]

Can you post the code that is causing the crash?

[brewbuck]

Does the crash occur when you run your code outside of the Windows service host? For that matter what exactly do you mean by "service," an actual Windows service or just some kind of server program?

[Codeplug]

What mingw build are you using?

I would try the latest SJLJ build from TDM: TDM's GCC/mingw32 Builds

gg

[laserlight]

I would try the latest SJLJ build from TDM: TDM's GCC/mingw32 Builds

Incidentally, I became aware less than an hour ago that the official MinGW port of GCC 4.4.0 was released last month, so it might be better to use that if GCC 4.4 is desired.

[Elkvis]

Can you post the code that is causing the crash?

without trying to sound like an ass, there's no specific code that does it.

from my original post:

it crashes any time I throw any kind of exception from a secondary thread

that sums it up pretty well.

For that matter what exactly do you mean by "service," an actual Windows service or just some kind of server program?

it is an actual service that starts the service control dispatcher, etc.

at any given time, there is a minimum of 3 threads running.

1. the main thread
2. the named pipe communication thread (also spawns additional threads for connections to the pipe)
3. the worker thread

it is inside the worker thread where I first noticed the problem. I originally noticed that when I tried to load a config file with my config file class, which throws exceptions upon failing to perform operations related to the config file, if there was a problem with the file, it would just crash instead of catching the exception. I then did more testing to see if other types of exceptions (other than my ConfigException type) would do it, and it turns out that any exception will crash the program, even if I just throw an int. I'm really confused, and running out of things to try.

[Elkvis]

upon further testing, I find that throwing an exception from ANYWHERE in my program causes it to crash. even in the main() function before anything else happens. now I'm REALLY confused.

[brewbuck]

upon further testing, I find that throwing an exception from ANYWHERE in my program causes it to crash. even in the main() function before anything else happens. now I'm REALLY confused.

So where exactly is this crash happening? Yes, it always happens when you throw an exception, but where exactly in the code does the crash happen? Inside your code or Windows code?

[Elkvis]

So where exactly is this crash happening? Yes, it always happens when you throw an exception, but where exactly in the code does the crash happen? Inside your code or Windows code?

I log data to a file to indicate line numbers, source file, etc, and the last line that appears in the file is the one just before the throw, and no line is inserted from inside the catch block. I don't even know if any windows code is being executed after the throw. my debugger doesn't want to work for me lately, so I'm really limited in what I can tell you.

[Elkvis]

so anyway, now that I'm back at work, I played with it a bit more and found that it only crashes when it is run as a service. the program can also be run in taskbar-icon mode, and when I do that, it does not crash upon throwing exceptions.

so now I have two new questions:
1. is it possible that running code within the windows SCM is not exception-safe?
2. would switching to microsoft's compiler help?

[brewbuck]

so anyway, now that I'm back at work, I played with it a bit more and found that it only crashes when it is run as a service. the program can also be run in taskbar-icon mode, and when I do that, it does not crash upon throwing exceptions.

so now I have two new questions:
1. is it possible that running code within the windows SCM is not exception-safe?
2. would switching to microsoft's compiler help?

Dude.. The first thing I asked was whether this is running as a service.

mingw has problems generating code that runs in service context. Switching to MS's compiler WILL help. Could have saved yourself a few days...

[Codeplug]

>> so now I have two new questions:
You're not the only one look'n for answers....

gg

[bithub]

Dude.. The first thing I asked was whether this is running as a service.

mingw has problems generating code that runs in service context. Switching to MS's compiler WILL help. Could have saved yourself a few days...

He answered your question.
>> it is an actual service that starts the service control dispatcher, etc.

[Elkvis]

Dude.. The first thing I asked was whether this is running as a service.

and I told you at that time that it is. I didn't mention the taskbar mode because at the time I didn't think it was relevant. the program crashes only when it runs in service mode.

mingw has problems generating code that runs in service context. Switching to MS's compiler WILL help. Could have saved yourself a few days...

are there any ways to work around this? I tried downloading GCC 4.4.0 for mingw, but i got a lot of linker errors:

'undefined reference to _Unwind_SjLj_Register'
'undefined reference to _Unwind_SjLj_Unregister'
'undefined reference to _Unwind_SjLj_Resume'

I suspect that these errors are a result of other libraries that I'm including, which were not compiled with this version of GCC. there doesn't seem to be a way to get around this, so I don't really know what I'm going to do about it, as the microsoft compiler is going to be a hard pill to swallow for the other developers here in my office.

[Codeplug]

>> which were not compiled with this version of GCC
Yeah, any static libs should be recompiled with the same version... You can't recompile them?

gg