On 2012-07-31 13:21, Don Clugston wrote:
I've heard this, but does anyone know what patent is being referred to? Several times I've heard mention of an old one by Borland, which Microsoft bought. The Borland patent is not a patent on SEH, it's basically a patent on using a thunk. I suspect it is extremely unlikely to be a valid patent, for sure there is prior art. And the only reason for implementing it with a thunk anyway, is as a workaround for the broken thread-local support in Windows prior to Vista.
I think it's this patent: http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=21MgAAAAEBAJ&dq=5,628,016 Inventor: Peter Kukol Original Assignee: Borland International, Inc. Primary Examiner: Peter J. Corcoran, III Current U.S. Classification: 717/140; 717/114 International Classification: G06F 945
It's not difficult to implement SEH without violating that patent (which is due to expire soon anyway). Is there some other patent that people are referring to?
It doesn't matter. The Clang/LLVM developers won't accept an implementation that has any chance of being covered by a patent.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
