I've been trying to implement some routines using the Boost library, primarily with the excellent RegEx library. Everything was working well enough in small tests, but when I tried running the routines on many patterns, my program would crash (it performs various pattern matching and search-and-replaces in multiple text files). I was able to determine that the crashes came on the calls to regex-related functions (though it tended to be a little unpredictable as to when, depending on the set of files I gave it).
I tried changing my project settings (I use VC6, btw) to link with "debug" libraries instead of the standard ones (eg. "Debug Multithreaded"), and ran the program again, and everything worked perfectly.
Unfortunately... I don't want to have my program running with all-debug libraries for performance and size reasons. However, is it possible to have my link-settings set to use standard libraries as before, but for the stuff that uses the regex library, to use a debug ".lib" file? Or... in the 'bjam' process, is it possible to say something to the effect of "when compiling the regex libraries, turn off compiler optimizations", so I can get a standard library that should work...?
I think you really need to track down the cause of the problem before blaming it on regex or the compiler. Some possible options: You're passing a temporary to one of the regex functions and getting out-of-date invalidated iterators back. You're using some data that's uninitialised (zero initialised in bebug mode, but garbage in release mode). Also don't forget that you can put debug information in an otherwise release build, and then debug it. You can also add the regex source directly to your project (but define BOOST_REGEX_NO_LIB project-wide to suppress auto-linking), and control options from there if it comes to it. John.