Hi Joe, 

Thanks for the report. 

I will fix the double definition of ffi_sint. I regularly build TXR as
C++, but I didn't test the combination "g++ and libffi missing"! 

The configure script currently doesn't test for anything other than
whether -lffi is needed for linking; the test program is hard coded to
#include <ffi.h>. That's the include syntax used in all the libffi
documentation, so I didn't bother detecting the location. 

TXR hasn't used anything so far that would require a big hammer like
pkg-config. (Is it really called pkg_config on Arch, by the way?) 

In the future, hopefully, we can avoid bogging down TXR with
dependencies by using this nice FFI I developed. 

I will change the test so it tries things exactly as it does now, and
then falls back on pkg-config if those approaches fail to compile and
link the test program. 

Cheers ... 

On 04.07.2017 14:37, Joe Eib wrote: 

> After receiving the following error during 'make_tests' 
> 
> ... 
> TXR tests/017/glob-carray.tl [1]-> tst/tests/017/glob-carray.out 
> ./txr: unhandled exception of type error: 
> ./txr: ffi-type-compile: unrecognized type specifier: closure 
> ./txr: during evaluation at tests/017/glob-carray.tl:30 [2] of form [mapcar ffi-type-compile 
> '(str int closure 
> (ptr-out glob-t))] 
> make: *** [Makefile:356: tst/tests/017/glob-carray.out] Error 1 
> 
> After a little digging I noticed that your configure script fails to detect my libffi because Arch Linux installs libffi.h in a nonstandard location. I don't know exactly what you're testing for there on line 2845 of configure but why not just use 'pkg_config --exists libffi' or the PKG_CHECK_EXISTS macro and then get the compiler and linker flags directly from pkg_config? 
> 
> Also, when I was trying to find the source of the issue, I compiled txr with g++ just for the hell of it and discovered that ffi_type_sint is declared twice on lines 141 and 144 which throws an error in g++.

 

Links:
------
[1] http://glob-carray.tl
[2] http://glob-carray.tl:30