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I’ll make this brief, but wanted to document my fix to potentially save someone else some aggravation in the future.

I’ve been working on a c++ project utilizing Google protobuf, and at one point ran into an error during application startup (static initialization):

libprotobuf ERROR google/protobuf/descriptor_database.cc:314] Invalid file descriptor data passed to EncodedDescriptorDatabase::Add().
libprotobuf FATAL google/protobuf/descriptor.cc:862] CHECK failed: generated_database_->Add(encoded_file_descriptor, size):
Abort (core dumped)

I came across two bug reports against protobuf that experienced this same error, but they seemed to be related to charset conversions. (This was briefly a red herring for me, since I had run into a charset issue earlier the same day, but didn’t end up solving my problem.)

Stepping through the code with a debugger alerted me to where in the code the abort signal was being thrown: from a call to ::google::protobuf::DescriptorPool::InternalAddGeneratedFile(…) with a big hard-coded string inside the pb.cc (protobuf-generated) file. This was my Eureka! moment, since I saw the filename of the original .proto file in the hard-coded string, which reminded me that at one point I’d renamed my .proto file and message name with ‘rename’ and ‘sed,’ and while the compiler thought everything was ok, apparently that wasn’t enough for protobuf.

Solution

After see that filename and remember the change I’d made, I just re-ran protoc ––cpp-out=./ <message.proto>, recompiled, and voilà, I was able to run without error! (Note that –cpp_out should use two standard hyphens; WordPress likes to be too smart for itself and replace characters with fancier versions, and I don’t want to patch core files on my shared system to fix it.)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2011 at 14:44 and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.