Hello Nick,
"BCS" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Hello bearophile,
Robert Jacques:
The patent seems to be Borlands's:
USPTO patent #5,628,016 Patent held by Borland on compiler support
for SEH.
From a Wine wiki page:
http://wiki.winehq.org/CompilerExceptionSupport
It does seem to expire on June 15, 2014, though and I assume
DigitalMars has a license, so a LLVM fork is not unreasonable.
On Windows G++ supports exceptions. I have two questions:
1) Do you know how they do this? Do they have a license? If they
have a licence why don't LLVM people too have it?
The patent holder has refused licenses to all OSS projects. What GCC
does is use a different system (something to do with tables). The
patent is strictly for SEH.
So can't LLVM just take the same approach?
Also, accoroding to
http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0197/Exception/Exception.aspx (One of the
links on the page from Robert above), SEH is a service provided by
Windows. So wouldn't MS be the only one that would need a license?
(I'm probably just misunderstanding something here.)
The title of the patent leads me to believe that it covers compilers that
generate code that uses SEH.
Plus, do we even know that this is what's holding up LLVM exceptions
on Windows?
I've heard from someone who would know that the patent is the reason SEH
isn't in LLVM. I also have it from some (different someone) that LLVM should
in theory have setjump/longjump exception handling under windows but they
didn't even venture a guess if it actually worked. If it doesn't and if LDC
would use it if it were fixed I'd be interested in at least looking into
fixing it (LDC people???).
--
... <IXOYE><
