11.1 Installing and using Libffi

Currently Vicare implements the foreign–functions interface (FFI) using an extenal library: Libffi, originally by Anthony Green. Libffi can be found at:

and it is distributed under a liberal license (look for it at the site, basically we can do everything but remove the original copyright notice).

On Unix–like systems, we can install Libffi with the traditional sequence:

$ ./configure [options]
$ make
$ make install

and the makefile supports the DESTDIR environment variable for installation under a different directory prefix.

NOTE Libffi version 3.0.10 installs its header files under:

${prefix}/lib/libffi-3.0.10/include

and trying to use the --includedir option to configure will not work in changing this. It means that when configuring Vicare for installation we have to specify where the Libffi headers are to be found; overview install for details.