Re: Compiling ctypes (libffi) for Windows Itanium

[Anthony Green <green at redhat dot com>]

On 01/26/2010 02:41 PM, Guy Rozendorn wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to build Python 2.6 for Windows Itanium.
> I have the IA64 MSVC compiler set up, and so far I managed to build the
> entire Python PCBuild project, except for ctypes.
>
> The project of course does not build on its own for IA64 on Windows, since
> its missing the appropriate assembly for the libffi part.
> Since we’re not familiar at all with itanium assembly, we tried to
> workaround it:
> • We looked at the existing windows linux assemblies in the project, and
> tried to understand what they do
> • We wrote some in C that should do pretty much the same, and compiled
> ctypes with that
> • It compiled without a too much hassle, but it didn’t work out (python
> crashes when using ctypes on itanium)
>
> So, my questions are:
> • Does someone successfully compiled ctypes for Windows IA64? Or have
> another lead for us?
> • It looks like that a compiler wrote the linux-ia64 assembly, and not a
> human being.

I'm pretty sure it was human-generated.

>   But we didn’t find the original C code of that in the project.
>    

The reason that libffi contains so much assembly code, is that it's 
impossible to implement the libffi magic in C.


> We hope that if we find the original C code, we can hack it a bit to also
> compile and work on windows-ia64.
> o  Does someone know who the linux-ia64 assembly code was generated? From
> which source? And who wrote it?
>    

Unless you're looking at a different source code than me, you'll notice 
that it lists Hans Boehm from HP as the author of the IA-64 Linux port.


> Any help would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Guy
>
>
>    


Good luck!


Anthony Green