Monday, March 28, 2022

[SOLVED] Vector push_back() fails when compiling with CMake and MinGW Makefiles

Issue

I've been searching all over the internet for a solution to this problem, however there is no good information about the origin of this problem. In essence, the program fails to run whenever I execute any vector-related function such as resize() or initializing the vector with a given size.

This is the current project structure of this example:

example_project
│   CMakeLists.txt 
|
└───src
│   |    main.cpp
│   
└───build
    │   Example.exe
    │   ...

CMakeLists.txt:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.20.0)

project(Example)

# Retrieve all source files
file(GLOB_RECURSE SOURCE_FILES ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/src/main.cpp)

add_executable(Example ${SOURCE_FILES})

main.cpp:

#include <iostream>
#include <vector>

int main() {
  std::cout << "Test\n";
  
  // Example code
  std::vector<int> exampleVector;
  exampleVector.push_back(1);

  // Same applies to any other vector operation
  // Ex: std::vector<int> exampleVector(10);

  return 0;
}

This code runs fine when compiling with CMake for Visual Studio via cmake .. from the build directory via the terminal. However, I want to build this project without any IDE, thus I want to directly compile it with CMake while still being able to use another text editor. Thus I assumed "MinGW Makefiles" to be a good candidate.

Building and running the application:

> cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles"  -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON  ..
> make

The above commands execute without any errors. Then running Example.exe yields:

I am rather inexperienced when it comes to CMake so I would appreciate any feedback on a better solution for building the project. But the bottom-line is that I want to use CMake for managing large projects without having to use any IDE or solution-file systems such as MSVC, just the terminal for building and running the application. The vector standard header seems to be the problem. Thank you in advance!


Solution

Edit:

It seems that the problem had to do with static linking of necessary libraries. Thus the solution I found was to include one of the static flags for g++ such as -static, -static-libstdc++, etc. To tell CMake to do this automatically upon compilation I just added this as a flag:

set(CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS "-static-libstdc++")

That being said I still have so many questions regarding the need to actually do this and if this is even the preferred solution or use-case of static linking.



Answered By - Jack Henrikson
Answer Checked By - Katrina (WPSolving Volunteer)
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