MIDL and COM

Ove Kaaven ovehk at ping.uio.no
Tue Nov 20 02:23:30 CST 2001


On 16 Nov 2001, Alexandre Julliard wrote:

> Ove Kaaven <ovehk at ping.uio.no> writes:
> 
> > Problem 1: MIDL-generated code.
> > midl.exe is Microsoft's IDL compiler, it reads .idl files which describe
> > RPC and COM interface, from which it generates .c files, .h files, and
> > typelibs. (It is possible to find copies of midl.exe floating on the net,
> > as some people have put together "COM kits" for Borland C++ that contains
> > midl.exe and some standard .idl files and put them on the web)
> > 
> > But can the machine-generated sources that MIDL outputs be put into the
> > official Wine source?
> 
> I'd prefer not. If we want to use .idl files we'll have to come up
> with our own compiler, and then we can put the .idl source in the tree
> and compile it at build time.

Hmm. Even when using flex and bison, it sounds like a fair amount of
work... wonder who would volunteer?

> > And how about source IDL files? Can we put into Wine IDL extracted from
> > real Windoze .tlb files with a tool like oleview.exe, or IDL parsed from
> > MIDL-generated Windows SDK .h files, like objidl.h, with a script?
> 
> No, anything generated from a Windows file is copyrighted by
> Microsoft, so we cannot distribute it. We need to rewrite these files
> from scratch, just like we do for the normal headers.

Now where are all the usual non-lawyers on this list who would argue that
API definitions, like prototypes in header files (which of course IDL, as
a formalized API spec format, is all about), cannot be copyrighted?
Oh well...





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