builtin_apply et al

[Richard Henderson]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2004 at 04:09:00PM -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >I've been told in the past it should be replaced with libffi - the main
> >problem there is ... how much reliable and portable is libffi ?
> >
>
> Needed for Java, so gets regular attention for that reason, and has
> platform specific code for lots of platforms. Libffi could be thought
> of as an implementation of builtin_apply.

And, most importantly, the hard bits are in hand-written assembly
instead of trying to get the compiler to do something strange.

Further, libffi has more information about (1) the ABI in use and
(2) the signature of the target function than builtin_apply.  So
some of the strange corner cases actually work.


r~