The static lib is only available on 32-bit platforms, BTW.

The crash occurs because of memory heaps. Windows was designed to avoid this problem by having a per-process heap that all code can discover. The compiler RTL then circumvents this and creates a new heap instance. Had they used GetProcessHeap instead of CreateHeap (or whatever they are called), it would not have been an issue.

If code allocates memory from one heap and frees it on another, things break.

The solution would be for the main perl interpreter dll to export a malloc/free pair of functions that are to be used by all XS code. Maybe it does and is under appreciated. Maybe that feature is missing? I don't know.

—John
Updated.

ActiveState Perl is built using a compiler that uses the run-time library that's used by the Windows internal stuff and many supplied apps, so that's easier

Both ActiveState Perl and Strawberry Perl use the same C runtime. Wrt to cfreeman's specific issues, neither has any advantage over the other.

cfreeman have you considered using the MinGW compiler (that ships with Strawberry Perl, and is also freely available elsewhere) to build the dll's - instead of using the incompatible VC9 ? That would be the best solution, imo - there would then be no problem using those dll's with either ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl.

Cheers,
Rob

It would still have the malloc/free problem with ActiveState.

If the XS doesn't use the rtl's malloc and free (see the other reply from Anonymous), I agree the MinGW's code is easier to distribute.

See perlclib, XS code is supposed to use New/Safefree

As anonymonk points out, XS code is meant to use New*() and Safefree(). In part, to avoid the predictable problems with multiple runtimes trying to manage heap memory. However, I find these PerlAPI functions inconvenient to use because of their non-standard calling syntax (a problem rife throughout the PerlAPI).

It means that you cannot initialise pointers in-line with their declarations. So, like many others, I've wrapped those APis in more convenient and intuative wrappers

void *Calloc( int n, int size ) {
    void *p;
    Newxz( p, n * size, char  );
    return p;
}

void Free( void *p ) {
    Safefree( p );
}
[download]

Note the uppercase first chars. Done to avoid conflicts with the dozens of other definitions and re-definitions of calloc() and free() (along with malloc() et al.) spread throughout the Perl sources.