Crashing in TTF_RenderText_Blended depending on build

SDL Development
1

Nearing the end of the development of my SDL2 game, I suddenly began to get crashes from TTF_RenderText_Blended. It has a perfectly good error reporting mechanism, but no, it didn’t report an error, it CRASHED with an invalid address. I tried a lot of things:

1. I demonstrated that all the parameters to it were valid. No bad pointers. Debugger can dereference them.

2. I tried deleting and reinstalling the SDL2_ttf package. Still crashing.

3. Being on a Mac, I tried using the Framework version (v. 2.24.0) vs the Homebrew-installed version. Still crashing, it seems to make no difference either way.

4. I tried putting calls to TTF_RenderText_Blended at various points rather early in my program, but to try to track down a potential memory corruption bug. Some of these worked – but it was INCONSISTENT as to how many of these it would reach before crashing!

So I finally bit the bullet and downloaded the source and added SDL_ttf.c to my project. I didn’t build the library from sources, but rather I decided to go the most direct route and just compile that source directly in with my other sources, so as to get at it with a debugger.

AND THE CRASH IS GONE!

But I’m left with a dirty, hacked build that I would rather not carry into the future. (And it somehow broke SDL_gfx, which now doesn’t draw anything.) I am mystified. Any thoughts, any insights, that might help me clean this up?

2

Could you publish a minimum example to demonstrate the problem?

3

That kind of crash usually points to a build mismatch — likely your SDL_ttf binary and your SDL2 (or libc) version were compiled with different flags or ABIs. When you compiled SDL_ttf.c directly, everything linked consistently, which is why the crash disappeared.

Check that both SDL2 and SDL2_ttf are built with the same compiler, architecture (x64 vs ARM), and runtime options. Also confirm your font surfaces and renderer contexts are initialized and freed in the same thread. Rebuilding SDL2_ttf from source against your current SDL2 should fix the issue cleanly without needing the hack.

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