DMD Backend Long-term

[BCS]

Hello Nick,

> "BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message
> news:a6268ff1581a8cce05541b41e04 at news.digitalmars.com...
> 
>> 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><