On 03 Mar 2016, at 21:58, Zachary Ware <zachary.ware+pydev@gmail.com> wrote:
Modules/_ctypes/libffi_osx: This is a "lightly patched" copy from somewhere before libffi-2.0, probably. It has barely been touched since 2009. I've been given to understand that it has modifications necessary to allow building fat binaries on OSX (Ned or Ronald would know better than I), but I don't know if such modifications may have made it upstream since pre-2.0. This one is used for all OSX builds that don't use
--with-system-ffi.
libffi_osx is a copy of the variant of libffi used by PyObjC, which was forked from libffi a long while ago (at the latest around the time OSX started supporting Intel processors, and probably earlier).
I don’t know if upstream libffi is good enough these days, this fork not only contains patches to make it easier to build fat binaries, but also contains a number of bug fixes that weren’t upstream at the time (mostly needed to support Apple’s interpretation of the x86_64 calling conventions in clang).
Ronald