SmartEiffel 1.0 Released

Per Wigren writes "Today SmartEiffel, the GNU Eiffel-compiler finally reached 1.0! Eiffel is a very underrated language in the free software community for some strange reason.. Hopefully this will help to gain some interest in this extremely powerful, fast, easy-to-read, easy-to-learn, almost self-debugging language!"

Comments

what's it good for?

[brandonfpu]

as perl started out great for scripting stuff and has grown, java started out with the promise of write once, run anywhere, what is eiffel's main strength according to it's developers (any users out here?)

Nice language

[_Spirit]

I learned OO programming in Eiffel. It's nice and structured. Never made anything useful with it though, compiling was cumbersome (Eiffel > C > binary) and it was impossible to do any GUI stuff with the tools I had back then (95 or so).

helloworld in Eiffel

[caternater]

For those, like me, wondering what Eiffel looked like, here is helloworld:

class HELLO_WORLD


creation
make
feature
make is
local
io:BASIC_IO
do
!!io
io.put_string("%N Hello World!!!!")
end --make
end -- class HELLO_WORLD

This was taken from http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/eiffel.html

Also, this interesting tidbit from the comp.lang.eiffel FAQ:

QEIF: What is Eiffel?

Eiffel is an advanced object-oriented programming language that emphasizes the design and construction of high-quality and reusable software.

Eiffel is not a superset or extension of any other language. Eiffel strongly encourages OO programming and does not allow dangerous practices from previous generation languages although it does interface to other languages such as C and C++. Eiffel supports the concept of "Design by Contract" to improve software correctness.

Beyond the language aspect Eiffel may be viewed as a method of software construction. Eiffel is an excellent vehicle for software education, including for a first programming course.

(http://omicron.felk.cvut.cz/FAQ/articles/a511.htm l)

Use TinyCC with SmartEiffel!

[Per Wigren]

If you're going to code in SmartEiffel, you should try using TinyCC instead of GCC while developing! TinyCC is an extremly fast and memoryefficient ANSI-C compiler that is 100% compatible with SmartEiffel! TCC generates code which is about as fast as "gcc -O2", but compiles almost 1000 times faster than "gcc -O2"!! I know these figures look unbelievable, but they are authentic! Just try it yourself if you don't believe it!

oggy gexace # time gcc -O2 -o gexace-gcc gexace.c
real 10m12.746s
user 9m33.227s
sys 0m4.897s
oggy gexace # time tcc -o gexace-tcc gexace.c
real 0m1.353s
user 0m0.472s
sys 0m0.061s
oggy gexace # ls -l gexace-*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1216938 Nov 29 18:27 gexace-gcc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 994200 Nov 29 18:27 gexace-tcc

The gexace.c examplefile is from GOBO, generated by SmartEiffel and is about 2MB...
When your program is ready to be distributed you can compile it using "gcc -O3 -mcpu=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math" or similar to make it run ~10% faster, but compilation may take hours instead of seconds...