Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Build broken (Re: [Pyobjc-checkins] CVS: pyobjc setup.py,1.19,1.20)

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

On Sunday, Dec 22, 2002, at 19:53 Europe/Amsterdam, Just van Rossum 
wrote:

> Ronald Oussoren wrote:
>
>> Modified Files:
>>   setup.py
>> Log Message:
>> libffi support should be off by default
>
> Yet it does break the build: I apparently don't have libffi (I have no
> idea what it is even), and setup.py stops like this:
>
> [ ...losts of similar stuff omitted...]
> Modules/objc/libffi_support.m:399: parse error before "cif"

Ehmm, I really shouldn't check in code on sunday night... This checkin 
was really bogus, the patch actually _enables_ libffi support.

Libffi is a library for dynamicly building stackframes and calling 
existing C functions. One of my earlier checkins today added code that 
uses libffi to call the superclass implementation of methods and to 
build the entries in the method tables of Objective-C classes. This 
allows us to do away with Modules/objc/register.m, a really enormous 
file. The library is also necessary if you want to add methods to pure 
Objective-C classes (which is simular to writing Objective-C categories 
in Python).

The main disadvantage of libffi is that it is a 3th party library that 
is not easily available: The current version is only available as part 
of the GCC sourcetree.

Ronald