DMD Backend Long-term

[Robert Jacques]

On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:47:14 -0400, BCS <none at anon.com> wrote:

> Hello Robert,
>
>> On Mon, 21 Jun 2010 23:55:48 -0400, BCS <none at anon.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Leandro,
>>>
>>>> Nick Sabalausky, el 21 de junio a las 13:40 me escribiste:
>>>>
>>>>> "Eldar Insafutdinov" <e.insafutdinov at gmail.com> wrote in message
>>>>> news:hvo49k$1uk3$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>>>
>>>>>> In the end, Windows is the most popular
>>>>>> OS despite our personal preferences, and it's worth spending some
>>>>>> time for
>>>>>> it.
>>>>> I wish someone could convince LLVM of that...
>>>>>
>>>> Maybe it should be the other way around. Someone who cares about
>>>> Windows should give some love to LLVM =)
>>>>
>>> How hard are the problems? I have zero experience in LLVM and very
>>> little in compiler work but if the problems could be attacked without
>>> to  much ramp-up I'd be interested in looking into them.
>>>
>> The main issue (as I understand it) is adding windows style structured
>> exception handling to LLVM.
>>
>
> After a little digging it seems that LLVM legally CAN'T add SEH as MS  
> has it under patent. I'm still digging to figure out how it could be  
> patented without making SEH an irrelevant technology.
>

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.