I switched from C driver to C++ driver and that resolved my issues. However, I do not see why the C driver shouldn't have worked. Since I'm using more than one DBMS I wanted to keep the libraries managing them under the same language binding and not all of them have competent C++ bindings.

The runtime error is simply complaining about an assertion failing on

command = BCON_NEW ("ping", BCON_INT32 (1));

call from the tutorial at

http://api.mongodb.org/c/1.3.5/tutorial.html#connecting

I had to change passing in "ping" to char ping[] = "ping"; and pass in the variable instead of the string literal to get it to compile. This tutorial was inserted in a bare fastcgi program.

I compiled my program with the folllowing command:

g++ main.cpp -lfcgi -lfcgi++ -lmongoc-1.0 -lbson-1.0 --std=c++14