Using installed libffi

[David Hoyt]

Is it possible to use an already built and installed libffi if it's available? I've already built libffi independently (both shared and static are available) and if you properly use package config, you can pick it up and use that instead of the bundled version. Is there a reason there's a bundled version? Does it diverge from standard libffi? If so, why?

[Timothy Wall]

It sometimes diverges. There *is* an option you can pass into the build to use the system-installed version, though (one of the linux distros asked for it). I can't recall offhand the exact semantics, though it should be easy enough to look up in build.xml or the Makefile.

On May 15, 2013, at 2:45 AM, David Hoyt wrote:

> Is it possible to use an already built and installed libffi if it's available? I've already built libffi independently (both shared and static are available) and if you properly use package config, you can pick it up and use that instead of the bundled version. Is there a reason there's a bundled version? Does it diverge from standard libffi? If so, why?
>

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[David Hoyt]

In what ways does it sometimes diverge? At this point would you consider libffi pretty stable?

[Timothy Wall]

I recently synched to libffi git repo, and found that it broke some w32 stdcall stuff. So the version on JNA has a fix until the patch works its way back into libffi.

For most purposes, the standard library (on linux distros) should be perfectly fine. All the important divergences to date have been on windows.