Borland software patent restricting GNU compiler development

Russell Shaw rjshaw@netspace.net.au
Wed May 11 16:57:00 GMT 2005


Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Ranjit Mathew:
> 
>>Without looking at the patent, I would hazard the guess
>>that it is about Win32 Structured Exception Handling (SEH):
>>
>>  http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0197/exception/exception.aspx
>>
>>(The linked-to mail from the GCC mailing list seems to
>>confirm this.)
> 
> Indeed.  Explicitly pushing an exception frame pointer on the main
> stack is covered by the patent.

Wouldn't that be somewhat old-hat and have prior art in C++ compilers
to prove it?

Even these simple C macros store setjmp buffers on the local function
stack to simulate (nested) try/catch:

   http://ldeniau.home.cern.ch/ldeniau/html/exception/exception.h
   http://ldeniau.home.cern.ch/ldeniau/html/exception/exception.html



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