Building the latest LibFFI for Windows

[Bas Groothedde <lua at xoru dot net>]

Hi there list! 

First of all, I hope that this list is still active. I'm trying to learn
more about the libffi source in the hopes of utilising it and hopefully
contributing to this project. 

I encountered a problem with libffi-3.2.1, build with msvc 2017 in
cygwin from source (sourceware.org:/pub/libffi/libffi-3.2.1.tar.gz [1]).
With a little tweaking in the build script I managed to get a nice
static x86 and x64 library build of libffi. Wonderful! 

I was then happily using the library until I encountered that on x86
Windows, the stdcall ABI in closures are a bit grumpy. Using the ABI in
callbacks for Windows API calls, like EnumChildWindows, crashes the
program and raises a 'Stack overflow' exception. 

This is a massive problem for me, as one of the biggest reasons I'm
using libffi is to support API access from a scripting language. I have
seen many reports on this issue, and many possible fixes, however none
of the fixes I encountered seemed to work in the 3.2.1 sources I
downloaded. 

If anyone has a fix for that version, I'd love to have it; as it
successfully builds with msvc on x86 and x64 platforms. 

The next thing I tried in my desperate quest for a solution is to fetch
the latest version of the libffi source of GitHub, and try to compile
that with my cygwin / msvc setup. (I need the Windows build to be a
static library produced by msvc) - however to my surprise the x64 build
went very well, but the x86 build yields an 'platform not supported'
error. Is there any way I can still build with msvc for x86, or am I
lost completely here? Building with mingw or gcc causes issues in the
software the library is going to be linked in, due to the fact a newer
standard library is linked (which is not available in that software). 

Thanks for your time, and hopefully someone will understand what my
rambling is about. 

Cheers!
Bas 
-- 

-------------------------

Bas Groothedde
Imagine Programming 

Links:
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[1] ftp://sourceware.org/pub/libffi/libffi-3.2.1.tar.gz