[Python-Dev] libffi inclusion in python

Thomas Heller theller at ctypes.org
Thu Apr 18 21:22:10 CEST 2013


>>> libffi has bugs sometimes (like this
>>> http://bugs.python.org/issue17580). Now this is a thing that upstream
>>> fixes really quickly, but tracking down issues on bugs.python.org is
>>> annoying (they never get commited as quickly as the upstream). is
>>> there a good reason why cpython has it's own copy of libffi? I
>>> understand historical reasons, but PyPy gets along relying on the
>>> system library, so maybe we can kill the inclusion.
>>
>> IIRC, it had (has?) some custom windows patches, which no one knows
>> whether they're relevant or not.

The only windows patch that is most certainly not in upstream is the
ability to check and correct the stack pointer after a windows function
call depending on the calling convention (stdcall or cdecl).

Since this is windows 32-bit only (on windows 64-bit these calling
conventions are aliases for the same thing), it would probably be good
to remove the distinction between them for function calls.


> Upstream seems to be incredibly responsive. Why not merge them there?

At the time when ctypes was implemented, this was different.  They
didn't even do libffi releases, IIRC.

Thomas



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