Re: DEVELOPERS NEEDED IMMEDIATELY FOR MINGW32 ALTERNATE C RUNTIME LIBRARY PROJECT

[Neil Booth <neil at daikokuya dot demon dot co dot uk>]

John Platts wrote:-

> - Patches to GCC to support SEH and Microsoft Platform SDK header files (if 
> necessary, write a patching utility to patch Microsoft Platform SDK header 
> files, especially in the case of the inline assembler)

I'm not sure I would find the changes to the preprocessor palatable to
make this possible.  For example, MS's ?$%@&^ header files require the
ability to macro-paste two '/'s and comment out the rest of the line.
e.g.

#define STUPID /##/
STUPID some gunk

comments out "some gunk".  This is not easily implemented in the
current preprocessor, owing to the extreme brokenness of the construct,
mixing up the phases of translation (comment removal is done before
macro expansion in any sane standards-conforming implementation).
I don't particularly want GCC's sources to be kludged to handle
such cases.

There are other broken things in MS's preprocessor that have been
reported to this list in the past, too.

> - Patches to GCC to support #import directive

GCC already has a #import directive which means something quite
different, based on my reading of MS's documentation.  The existing
meaning of #import already has many users, particularly in the
Objective C community.

Therefore, personally speaking, I would prefer that the necessary
CPP changes were distributed as a patch to GCC's mainline tree,
rather than obfuscating GCC just to handle Microsoft's broken
header files.

Neil.