OS X program runs on dev machine, crashing horribly on others

Question

I have an OS X 10.6 Mac I'm using as my dev machine. The program I wrote works perfectly on the dev machine. However, when I tried to run it on an OS X 10.5 (not sure if that's relevant) test machine, it crashes on launch.

This is the error I'm getting:

Process:         MyApp[25908]
Path:            /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/MyApp
Identifier:      MyApp
Version:         ??? (???)
Code Type:       X86 (Native)
Parent Process:  launchd [109]

Interval Since Last Report:          17392106 sec
Crashes Since Last Report:           735
Per-App Interval Since Last Report:  0 sec
Per-App Crashes Since Last Report:   8

Date/Time:       2010-08-14 07:50:09.768 -0700
OS Version:      Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a)
Report Version:  6
Anonymous UUID:  1BF30470-ACF2-46C7-B6D5-4514380965C8

Exception Type:  EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread:  0

Dyld Error Message:
  Symbol not found: __ZSt16__ostream_insertIcSt11char_traitsIcEERSt13basic_ostreamIT_T0_ES6_PKS3_i
  Referenced from: /Applications/MyApp.app/Contents/MacOS/MyApp
  Expected in: /usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib

So it looks like it's crashing because it's loading an incompatible version of the dynamic library libstdc++.6. Is this type of thing ordinary? A search on Google doesn't really reveal many other programs that have this problem. What should I be doing in my compile to prevent this from happening? Do I need to be somehow including libstdc++ inside of my application bundle?

Answer 1

There are a few points I can think of:

1. Did you compile it as a "release build"? The debug build might not run on machines other than the one in which it is compiled.

2. Which SDK did you use? Which minimal OS version did you specify in the build settings? If you want to run it on 10.5, you need to use 10.5 SDK and/or set the target OS to be 10.5. See this Apple document on building for multiple OS versions.

3. Did the target machine have DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH set to something non-empty? If not done carefully, that might confuse dyld.

One way to distinguish various possibilities is to run your app in the dev machine, but with a separate account with no admin privilege from the dev account; then you can test whether it runs in an 10.6 box.