Why can't autoconf find `libtcmalloc`?

Question

I'm trying to compile a complex numerical simulation software. After running autoconf and then ./configure ... (with some other flags), I see the following in the output:

checking for malloc in -ltcmalloc... no
configure: WARNING: No tcmalloc support available.

After looking in configure.in I found:

%zsh> grep 'tcmalloc' configure.in
    AC_CHECK_LIB(tcmalloc,malloc,,AC_MSG_WARN([No tcmalloc support available.]))

I have gperftools installed which should provide tcmalloc I think. I do have a few libraries that are called something like that:

%zsh> ldconfig -p|grep 'tcmalloc'
    libtcmalloc_minimal_debug.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal_debug.so.4
    libtcmalloc_minimal_debug.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal_debug.so
    libtcmalloc_minimal.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so.4
    libtcmalloc_minimal.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_minimal.so
    libtcmalloc_debug.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_debug.so.4
    libtcmalloc_debug.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_debug.so
    libtcmalloc_and_profiler.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_and_profiler.so.4
    libtcmalloc_and_profiler.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc_and_profiler.so
    libtcmalloc.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so.4
    libtcmalloc.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libtcmalloc.so

I tried adding libtcmalloc to the list in configure.in but I just get:

checking for tcmalloc in -llibtcmalloc... ./configure: line 11516: WARNING:: command not found
no

Is there a way to get autoconf's AC_CHECK_LIB to detect my tcmalloc library?

Answer 1

Not sure if this is a "fix" or a "workaround", and I realise it's hard to help without more information about the software in question, but I was able to avoid the warning by explicitly adding -ltcmalloc to LIBS in the configure flag:

./configure LIBS='-ltcmalloc ...' ...

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Update 27 Nov:

I somehow can't reproduce the warning anymore, even without the workaround. It's possible that I used a slightly different set of configure fags, or had somehow messed up my configure scripts. I'll leave this here in case the workaround is helpful to others.