CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++eclipsemingw
Max Roncace
Max Roncace

Reputation: 1262

C++ HelloWorld program compiled with MinGW crashes with "Illegal Argument"

I decided it was time that I learned C++, and after struggling for 3+ hours trying to get the compiler to work, I finally created a working program. However, it seemingly spontaneously broke when I tried to refactor the project in Eclipse by cutting and pasting it. The program simply crashes, and Windows brings up the dreaded dialogue "HelloWorld.exe has stopped working." A bit of debugging revealed that "cout" was considered an illegal argument. I looked some more into the issue, and I'm now suspicious that it has something to do with the compiler apparently being 32-bit, as I have a 64-bit system. The executable is listed in Eclipse as "HelloWorld.exe - [x86/le]." (Minus the period.) My program in full is below:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main(){
    cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
    return 0;
}

I've also just discovered that creating a new "HelloWorld" C++ project in Eclipse does absolutely nothing to fix the issue, even using the unmodified code and settings. Anyone have any suggestions as to why this would happen?

EDIT: Debugging information: Upon running the program:

Hello World!
Program received signal SIGNILL, Illegal instruction.
0x6fccc3c0 in libstdc++-6!_ZSt4cout ()
    from C:\Windows\SysWOW64\libstdc++-6.dll
(gdb) bt
#0   0x6fccc3c0 in libstdc++-6~_ZSt4cout ()
    from C:\Windows\SysWOW64\libstdc++-6.dll
#1   0x6fc8908c in libstdc++-6~_ZSt4cout ()
    from C:\Windows\SysWOW64\libstdc++-6.dll
#2   0x004013be in libstdc++-6~_ZSt4cout () at HelloWorld.cpp:4
(gdb)

It should be noted that line 4 of the class now points to the cout call.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 5643

Answers (2)

Andreas Wittmann
Andreas Wittmann

Reputation: 21

Build it statically so you don't have to worry about wrong depencies. Just add "-static" to your Compiler-options.

Upvotes: 2

greatwolf
greatwolf

Reputation: 20878

After looking at your gdb backtrace, the problem appears to be an incompatible C++ runtime libstdc++.dll.

This could happen if you're installing MinGW over an existing install. Another way this could happen is if some other third party program needing libstdc++.dll installed its dependencies into your Windows\SysWow64 so it could be found system wide. The issue is of course, differing versions of the libstdc++ aren't compatible with each other at the ABI level. Programs compiled with a given Mingw g++ version needs to load the corresponding libstdc++.dll that came with that particular Mingw install.

Open a new cmd.exe prompt and set the Path environment to your current mingw\bin install directory. For example, if your mingw install is in c:\mingw32-4.7.2:

C:\>set path=C:\mingw32-4.7.2\bin

Then try running helloworld.exe again. If it runs to completion without crashing then that is likely the problem. In this case you should remove the libstdc++.dll from windows\syswow64.

Upvotes: 3

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