Boost Spirit crash when used in DLLs

Question

I am experiencing a crash while using the Boost.Spirit and Boost.Thread libraries in my application. This only happens if I have used the Spirit parser during the lifetime of the process from the main thread.

The crash happens at exit and appears to be related to the clean-up of thread specific storage allocated by the Spirit parser. It is probably crashing due to the sequence of which DLLs are unloaded, as the thread specific memory is allocated inside a DLL that has already been unloaded. The Boost.Thread DLL is however not unloaded untill the application itself exits.

Is there a way for me to force Spirit to clean out its thread specific storage, e.g. in my dll-main when i get a process-detach notification?

Any solutions/hints would be appreciated.

PS! My platform and settings:

• Visual Studio 2005
• BOOST_ALL_DYN_LINK
• BOOST_SPIRIT_THREADSAFE

Answer 1

Boost.Spirit is header-only, i.e. it does not reside in its own dll, so maybe it is not the unloading order of dlls but rather a different issue.

Make sure the instance containing your spirit parser is deleted and doesn't leave dangling pointers.

Answer 2

Well I found a workaround.

Every place I use the boost::spirit::parse call, I basically spawn a workerthread to run it, while the calling thread is blocking on a join call with the workerthread. Not ideal, but it appears to be working without any sideeffects so far.

Still interested in any alternatives as my gut feeling is that a seperate thread shouldn't really be needed.