I have a C++ application that I am porting to MacOSX (specifically, 10.6). The app makes heavy use of the C++ standard library and boost. I recently observed some breakage in the app that I'm having difficulty understanding.

Basically, the boost filesystem library throws a runtime exception when the program runs. With a bit of debugging and googling, I've reduced the offending call to the following minimal program:

#include <locale>

int main ( int argc, char *argv [] ) {
    std::locale::global(std::locale(""));
    return 0;
}

This program fails when I run this through g++ and execute the resulting program in an environment where LANG=en_US.UTF-8 is set (which on my computer is part of the default bash session when I create a new console window). Clearing the environment variable (setenv LANG=) allows the program to run without issues. But I'm surprised I'm seeing this breakage in the default configuration.

My questions are:

1. Is this expected behavior for this code on MacOS 10.6?
2. What would a proper workaround be? I can't really re-write the function because the version of the boost libraries we are using executes this statement internally as part of the filesystem library.

For completeness, I should point out that the program from which this code was synthesized crashes when launched via the 'open' command (or from the Finder) but not when Xcode runs the program in Debug mode.

edit The error given by the above code on 10.6.1 is:

$ ./locale 
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::runtime_error'
  what():  locale::facet::_S_create_c_locale name not valid
Abort trap