QuantumG's Blog

I had an major issue where the Boehm garbage collector was crashing and spitting errors because of my use of Qt4's QThread class. The problem was simple enough, Qt4 calls pthread_create when it should be calling GC_pthread_create. I could have solved this problem by modifying qthread_private.cpp to do this, but that would mean distributing a modified Qt4, which is just silly for such a small change. So after much annoyance, I managed to come up with a solution that, although not pretty, seems to work. As such, there will be a Linux version of the GUI available to download when I make binary packages sometime in the next week.

I tried compiling the Boomerang GUI on Linux last night. After much effort getting Qt4 to compile I was hopeful that everything would just work. Unfortunately the trick I used to get the garbage collector to only collect memory allocated by the decompiler thread on WIN32 doesn't work on Linux. Apparently you're supposed to call GC_pthread_create instead of pthread_create to start new threads, well I'm not calling either, I'm getting Qt to create my thread for me. So what to do? I guess I could modify Qt to use GC_pthread_create, but that means any binaries I distribute will have to include my modified Qt. I'm going to look into ways to register a thread with the allocator directly. Another alternative is to just stop all this garbage collector nonsense, but modifying Boomerang to delete when appropriate is just out of the question. I have seriously considered using smart pointers, possibly from Boost, but as of yet I've not made a firm decision. It would...