Re: [Pyobjc-dev] libFFI

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

On Sunday, Jan 5, 2003, at 19:23 Europe/Amsterdam, Bill Bumgarner wrote:

> On Sunday, Jan 5, 2003, at 13:03 US/Eastern, Ronald Oussoren wrote in 
> a CVS log entry:
>> libFFI support now actually works (that is passes the testsuite with 
>> the
>> same failures as the non-libFFI version)
>
> Congratulations!
>
> Some questions (as I know nothing about libFFI):
>
>     - how hard is it to build libFFI such that PyObjC can be built 
> with libFFI support?
It is not that hard, it is installed using the usual 
'configure;make;make install' commands. You just have to download the 
entire GCC distribution for this. Now that it actually works I'll try 
to build an archive containing just libFFI + whatever else is needed to 
build it.

>
>     - this eliminates register.m, correct?   How much smaller is the 
> resulting binary?
It does eliminate register.m. The objc/_objc.so without libFFI is 2.6M 
on my machine, while the one with libFFI is 0.6M (and that is including 
libFFI)

>
>     - what is the performance difference when using libFFI?   (Maybe 
> wrap runalltests with calls to 'timing'?)
That is something I haven't checked yet. I expect that the difference 
won't be noticeable: The non-libFFI version uses NSInvocation, which 
probably is as (in)efficient as libFFI.

I'll create a simple performance test, that might also be usefull to 
check how much worse the performance of PyObjC is compared to native 
Objective-C (w.r.t. message dispatching).

Ronald