Re: [Chicken-users] libffi & cmake

[John Cowan]

Brandon J. Van Every scripsit:

> Or is it some horrible set of parallel ill-defined borkings that no
> one in their mind would want to deal with?

Pretty much.  As Felix said, it isn't always libffi itself but the
way it is installed.

> In which case, I might ask why use libffi at all?

Because it lets you escape from Chicken's limit of 126 arguments per
call.  (It's not so much that you want to call a static procedure
with that many arguments, but that you may want to call apply or map
on a list longer than that.)

> Or, why use a system libffi.  If it's that bad, it would be safer to
> put a "known good" version in Chicken itself, as we do with PCRE.

Because it has to be synchronized with gcc; it has intimate knowledge
of gcc's calling conventions on the particular platform.  Much of the
borkage arises when libffi and gcc belong to different releases.

-- 
Clear?  Huh!  Why a four-year-old child         John Cowan
could understand this report.  Run out          address@hidden
and find me a four-year-old child.  I           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
can't make head or tail out of it.
        --Rufus T. Firefly on government reports