Fix for OS X Mavericks (10.9) compilation and build errors

All the issues on Mavericks should have been resolved.

Original page

Starting from Mac OSX 10.9 (Mavericks) the default C++ standard library changed to libc++ (the LLVM library). This switch has caused (and still causes) a lot of issues because the new library is more stringent on non-standard C++. For example Orocos KDL uses non-standard C++ in the TreeNode class thus it is not possible to build it with libc++ (see related Github issue).

You can (and must) build KDL by explicitly specify the old GNU C++ library. You can do this by adding to CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS and CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS the following string: -stdlib=libstdc++.

Currently if you generate an Xcode project or if you generate a Unix Makefile under OS X the above fix is done automatically for you.

One issue still remains. It is not clear if two applications can link (shared linking, not static linking) at the same time the GNU and LLVM C++ library. For sure Homebrew does not allow it. You can check which shared libraries an application (or another shared library) links by issuing the following commands:

otool -L library_name

E.g.

$ otool -L libYARP_OS.dylib 
local/lib/libYARP_OS.dylib:
    libYARP_OS.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 2.3.60)
    /usr/local/lib/libACE.dylib (compatibility version 0.0.0, current version 0.0.0)
    /usr/lib/libstdc++.6.dylib (compatibility version 7.0.0, current version 60.0.0)
    /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1197.1.1)