[Chicken-users] libffi

[Category 5]

felix wrote:

> Also: the darcs repository now has preliminary support for using
> libffi (http://freshmeat.net/redir/libffi/17361/url_homepage/libffi)
> to overcome the 126-argument limit: C_apply uses this facility to
> portably construct function calls with more than 126 arguments
> (currently with an arbitrary limit of 1000).

This is really cool.  A few questions:

- Assuming this is stable, will Chicken end up incorporating libffi and
  using this system by default on platforms that support it?  It looks
  like libffi is fairly small and the license is very permissive.  (Is
  it still under development / being ported to more platforms?)

- Are there any disadvantages to doing things this way?

- Any idea on the relative performance hit in doing something like
      (apply + (make-list 1000000 1))
  with Chicken+libffi vs. other Scheme compilers?

As a side issue not related to libffi, at least in 1.66 the following
happens to me:

  Version 1, Build 66 - netbsd-gnu-ultrasparc
  #;1> (require-extension srfi-1)
  ; loading library srfi-1 ...
  #;2> (apply + (make-list 1000000 1))
  zsh: bus error (core dumped)  csi

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