aspects and branching

This is a repost of a question I asked in another thread:

http://www.intellij.net/forums/thread.jsp?forum=22&thread=24198

Since it seems that you guys are implementing your own flavor of aspect j, could you detail what some of the deltas will be? I'm worried about branching.

It also seems like a lot of work to write your own compiler, esp since the stated reason for writing your own is incremental compilation, which looks like it's in the 1.1 release of aspect j (now in rc)

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/indextech.cgi/_checkout/aspectj-home/README-11.html#INCREMENTAL

There's also the patent question, since PARC patented portions of AOP/Aspectj. They gave a royalty free license to AspectJ, but would rolling your own possibly violate this?

I'm just asking these questions because I'm very eager to see aspects integrated with IDEA, and want to see all possible issues solved up front.

--peter