Re: porting

[Armando Di Cianno]

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On 2005-10-05 12:18:10 -0400 Helge Hess <helge.hess@opengroupware.org>
wrote:

> On 5. Okt 2005, at 17:33 Uhr, Armando Di Cianno wrote:
> > WRT GNUstep, I've had varying luck with both, possibly leaning toward
> > the sentiment that ffcall is more stable than libffi (again, wrt
> > GNUstep).
>
> Isn't libffi included in GCC? What about using the one coming with 
> the 
> compiler, this is probably best maintained and a dependency is 
> removed?

Not sure how the different binary distros do it, but libffi is only
installed by gcc if gcj is configured to be on (unless you use the
different patches floating around).  I'm hoping this will be fixed in
some release of gcc-4 series (making it an installable target by
itself).

Also, I'm unclear as to how much development v. maintainence libffi
receives.  I know some projects like SableVM maintain their own
version of libffi, IIRC.

I've also been personally affected by a situation where libffi, wrt
GNUstep, worked on one Pentium-M (earlier rev) platform, and
absolutely failed on another Pentium-M (never rev, 400Mhz FSB).
Because of this, and misc. anecdotes I have from the past year and
half of using libffi with GNUstep, I firmly believe that ffcall is a
much better supported option, for GNUstep, at this point.  Having said
that, it would be nice to have libffi working and stable, and
well-supported by GNUstep.

__Armando Di Cianno


> Greets,
>   Helge
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