Failure with assert for gcc program on zedboard

We are running an encoder code on a normal PC and it runs fine. When we port the same code to the xilinx zedboard with a cortex arm processor it exits at runtime with the assert statement.

for example assert (ref1 < ref2);
ref2 is 1 most of the times.
ref1 is a member of a class which is updated in every iteration.
ref1 never goes above 1 when run on a PC while when run on arm board for some 4-5 iterations it runs fine but immediately in the subsequent iterations it exits with ref1 having value 255.

the gcc version running on the zedboard is higher version then the pc version so gcc version should not be problem.