Linker error for gtest on OS X Mavericks

Question

I've been working for a while with the gtest unit testing library for a while. Recently I set up a new development machine and upgraded to Mac OS X 10.9. I installed

brew tap homebrew/versions
brew install [flags] gcc48

I built gtest locally with

cmake .
make

and it produced libgtest.a.

The second dependency of my project is the logging library log4cxx. I got it as usual with:

brew install log4cxx

All that looks fine. But when I try to compile now, I get this massive linker error about undefined symbols which I cannot interpret. Any ideas?

Answer 1

This issue relates to the use of -stdlib= when compiling. I cannot tell you which value (libstdc++ or libc++) is the correct one to use, but it has to match the one used by the libraries when they were compiled.

I guess you'll need to dig through the homebrew logs to find out.

Answer 2

The other trick to look at is to make sure that everything you are compiling is using the same -mmacosx-version-min value for all of your executable units that you are linking together. If you don't define one, Mavericks will use 10.9 and it appears to link with libc++ by default, while if you use -mmacosx-version-min=10.8 or lower it will link with libstdc++ by default.

This will give you a mismatch where some of your symbols are std::__1::foo and some are std::foo when you run them through c++filt.