boost mutex C++/CLI problems

Question

I\'m developing in Visual Studio 2008 C# for 64bit and I want to use to use a library which uses boost. So I wrote a wrapper in C++/CLI. I managed to target the error I get

Answer 1

As the other answer says, boost's pragmas in tss_pe.cpp are incompatible with the CLR. A simple modification to that file fixes the issue though and will permit static linkage. My modified version for Boost 1.44 is here (diff versus this for changes made).

Answer 2

Some of the Boost libraries must not be linked statically with the C++ CLI code otherwise the compiler can generate an incompatible image for some of the Windows versions. As far as I am concerned, I had a hard time figuring out the issue when statically building with Boost 1.64 x86 thread library with VC++ 2017 under windows 10. The binary worked fine under Windows 10 but raised a System.BadImageFormatException under Windows 7. The issue was located in the Boost thread library which I initially statically linked to my C++ CLI assembly.

Here is a short code which easily reproduces the problem:

testcli.h - C++ CLI assembly FAILURE code

#pragma comment(lib, "libboost_thread-vc141-mt-1_64.lib") // static link makes the program crash under W7

namespace testcli
{
    public ref class TestClass { public: static void Test(){} };
}

Program.cs - C# client code loading 'testcli'

using testcli;

namespace Cli
{
    class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { new TestClass(); } } // instanciate C++ CLI Boost class 
}

The code above returns by raising a System.BadImageFormatException (the exception can be found in the Application Event Viewer).

If testcli is changed so that the Boost thread library is now linked dynamically:

testcli.h - C++ CLI assembly SUCCESSFUL code

#pragma comment(lib, "boost_thread-vc141-mt-1_64.lib") // dynamic link works fine under any Windows

namespace testcli
{
    public ref class TestClass { public: static void Test(){} };
}

The code now returns successfully.

Note that you can define BOOST_THREAD_DYN_LINK instead of BOOST_ALL_DYN_LINK as explained here: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_64_0/doc/html/thread/build.html

Doing so, you will not have to package all the Boost dynamic libraries with your application.

Answer 3

The problem is that boost.thread uses some #pragma section directives that are incompatible when built without /clr then statically linked to code that uses /clr.

I've heard that rebuilding boost.thread with /clr (i.e., pass cxxflags="/clr" when invoking bjam) fixes the issue, but I haven't tried it personally.

I assume that dynamically linking to boost.thread (rather than statically, which is the default for VC++; #define BOOST_THREAD_DYN_LINK before including any boost headers) should work too, but again, I haven't tried it.

If that doesn't work, try googling for some combination of boost thread clr tls; you should find quite a few posts on the boost mailing list about it, as this is an old problem.

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EDIT: As commented here by Raman Sharma (a senior PM at Microsoft), even std::mutex isn't supported with /clr, so it's no real surprise that boost.thread's mutex implementation isn't either.