Eiffel as a Gnome Development Language ?

Thomas Delaet writes " This article is a short evaluation of Eiffel as a language for developing the core gnome desktop platform. Last month, there has been a heavy debate about a successor for C/C++ as the language of choice for developing the core gnome desktop components in. The debate has mostly focussed around C#/Mono and Java. This article tries to summarize the different requirements for a gnome development language and shows how Eiffel fits in these criteria."

Comments

Another alternative is D

[HiThere]

Digital Mars D currently runs on Linux and MSWind. It doesn't, AFAIK, run on the Mac yet, but there's no intrinsic problem.

I like Eiffel a lot more than C, but I like D better than Eiffel. D is like C++ that got it right. (Well, it was designed decades later, so that's not too surprising.) D links easily with C code. Much more easily than Eiffel does. D doesn't have the wide variety of implementations that Eiffel does. Eiffel suffers from the problem that each compiler comes with it's own set of libraries. (It also suffers from functions not being overloadable, but that's on purpose. Still, I count it as a definite drawback to require different operators to multiply integers, floats, and I*F and F*I -- all require different operators in Eiffel, that that's just the start of the problem.)

Objective-C?

[skurken]

How about it? It's good enough for Apple and it's easily integrated with existing C and C++ code.

And personally, it think it's sort of UN*X-ish in it's attitude. The way you can fiddle with messages almost makes you feel like playing with a UN*X-installation as root.

I don't think so

[hak1du]

Last I looked, SmartEiffel...

• lacked dynamic loading of shared libraries
  
• lacked separate compilation
  
• lacked usable Gnome bindings
  
• lacked reflection
  
• failed to come even close to implementing the de-facto standard set by Eiffelstudio (no compatible thread implementation, no method pointers, incomplete library implementation)
  
• failed to come even within an order of magnitude of equivalent C++ code in terms of performance
  

Furthermore, Eiffel is hardly an open language standard in the same sense as C, C++, or C#; the evolution of the Eiffel language has been driven by Meyer's whims, not by any kind of independent community or standards body. The language definition had some serious problems (requirement for global type checking, covariance, lack of method pointers, etc.), some of which remain. Eiffel could have been a winner, a worthy successor to Pascal and Modula-2, back when those were still fashionable, more than a decade ago before Java, but its proponents blew it big time, both technically and business-wise. Let's not beat a dead horse.

In my opinion, C# is, in every way, a better-designed language than Eiffel, C# has better open source implementations, better open source libraries, better C/C++ interfaces, and more widespread industry acceptance.

Realistically, Java

[Animats]

OK, you're doing a desktop. Mostly GUI elements, no hard real time requirements, lots of pointers, many developers.

Java seems appropriate here, if you can get the performance. It's a memory-safe language, and you don't have to obsess on memory management correctness. Garbage collection is acceptable. There's a big pool of Java developers. There's a hard-code open source compiler. Microsoft doesn't control the language or the environment.

Whether the rather clunky Java libraries add negative value is something you have to think about, hard. The language itself is OK.