Any reason why libffi is not included in the builds?

[gzigurella]

When: I was looking forward to use these standalone builds to implement a plugin system battery-included for a Golang event loop.

What: I faced the problem when using ctypes needed to make a bridge between the two. In particular I've seen that in the current builds (at least on linux x86_64) inside the lib folder libffi.so is missing, and therefore when calling ctypes it looks for _ctypes but it cannot find it.

Workaround: Currently I'm exposing libffi.so in another path of my project to ensure it's available, but I think it should be included to make these python builds really standalone.

Why: Is there any particular reason why the libffi is not included? From the source I've seen it and I guess it's being used in the making of the builds, but I've not seen it in detail.

I may even work on the problem myself with some minor guidance to where to start to look.

Environment
Python 3.13.11 (python-build-standalone x86_64 install only, release 20250808)
Build environment: debian:12
uv 0.8.9

Edit: added information on my environment
Edit 2: added release date of the build

[zsol]

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't libffi a completely orthogonal project? AFAICT ctypes is fully functional in the standalone builds - isn't the library you're trying to load the one that depends on libffi.so?

[gzigurella]

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't libffi a completely orthogonal project? AFAICT ctypes is fully functional in the standalone builds - isn't the library you're trying to load the one that depends on libffi.so?

I really appreciate your question because maybe I'm missing something, from python stacktrace executed from the standalone build when I'm using ctypes it looks inside ctypes __init__.py script, which searches for _ctypes which throws a NoModuleFoundError due to libffi.so being absent in the lib folder, I'm currently at work and I'm typing this from my phone but I'll add another comment later showing the complete stacktrace, thanks for taking interest in my issue!

[geofft]

libffi is indeed one of the many things that is statically linked into these builds. If ctypes is failing because it can't find it that smells like a bug - I'll investigate next week. This may or may not require switching it to a dynamic library like we just did with libtcl and libtk. We may also do that for all our libraries anyway (see also #227).