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Asked: 2026-05-19T03:15:42+00:00

I have a program that runs fine on MacOS and Linux and cross-compiles to

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I have a program that runs fine on MacOS and Linux and cross-compiles to Windows with mingw. Recently I made the program multi-threaded.

The current design of the program has memory allocated in the main thread and freed in the slave “worker” threads. That’s not a problem on MacOS and Linux because the malloc/free system is multi-threaded.

I’m concerned about the cross-compiling, however. The version of mingw that I’m using is built from MacOS ports. It’s a pretty ancient version of G++ (version 3.4.5) from 2004. I’ve been unsuccessful in my attempts to build a more recent version (I’d like to build a 64-bit version, but gave up). I’m getting pthreads from http://sourceware.org/pthreads-win32.

My concern is that the malloc & free system in 3.4.5 is not multi-threaded.

Questions:

  1. Should I rewrite my program so that the blocks of memory to be freed are passed back to the main thread to be freed there?

  2. Should I try to upgrade to a more recent mingw?

  3. Is there any way to find these concurrency problems other than massive amounts of testing? That just doesn’t feel good to me.

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Why do you say malloc & free are not multithreaded?

    mingw32 by default will link with msvcrt.dll which is a multithread dll. See [1]. There was[2] a single-threaded library provided by Microsoft, but it was only available for static linking.

    PS: You mention that you are cross-compiling but you seem instead to be compiling the windows program in windows. In such case, Why don’t you dowload the binaries from http://www.mingw.org? (it’s a pain to figure out in their downloads the files needed, though)

    1- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/abx4dbyh%28v=VS.71%29.aspx

    2- See [1]. Removed in Visual Studio 2005 http:// msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/abx4dbyh%28v=VS.80%29.aspx

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