On 12/07/2006, at 4:15 AM, Evan Lavelle wrote:
> Can anyone please tell me what the status of libffi is?
What's the
> current version, and where's the best place to
download stand-alone
> sources?
>
> I'm also confused about why libffi is now part of gcc
- does this
> mean that gcc has some sort of native support for
dynamic function
> calls? I can't find anything in the online docs about
this.
Good question. As far as I can see, it is all
disintegrating into
one of those unfortunate open source messes, which happen
when the
project is not managed.
I have spent some time on this and discovered the following:
There is a version of libffi distributed with gcc. However,
it is
not officially part of gcc because of problems over
copyright. All
official gcc code must be copyright FSF and covered by GPL.
This
requires the original authors and copyright holders to
assign their
rights to the FSF. In this case I think there is
uncertainty about
who they are.
As a result little work is done on it in the gcc code base.
I think
it is used to as part of gcc Java support.
There is another version distributed by the PyObjc folks,
who have
added ppc64 and i386 support for Darwin, but these have not
been
added back into gcc because of the copyright issues.
GNUstep developers also pitch in some times.
There are probably other forks out there produced by people
who
needed them for one reason or another.
There is always ffcall which has similar functionality but
again has
possible copyright issues.
Bill Northcott
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