Tuesday, January 23, 2007
EiffelStudio to move to FreeElks
Emmanuel ("Manu") Stapf has confirmed on the ES-devel mailing list that EiffelStudio will eventually replace its "base" library classes with the corresponding classes from the open source FreeElks project, which is administered by Emmanuel Stapf and Eric Bezault.
At first glance this seems rather odd. FreeElks was established (with ISE's blessing and initial donation of code) to provide a free implementation of EiffelBase - but this was before EiffelStudio itself became open source.
So why the switch? There's one key difference between the FreeElks and EiffelStudio libraries - FreeElks will not have any dependencies on the EiffelStudio runtime. This will make it possible to use the same core kernel library library - with bug-for-bug compatibility - for both EiffelStudio and Eric's Gobo Eiffel Compiler.
Manu advises that the switch will take place "when elks compiles". Although freeelks is under active development, it may be a while yet before it's a "drop-in replacement".
At first glance this seems rather odd. FreeElks was established (with ISE's blessing and initial donation of code) to provide a free implementation of EiffelBase - but this was before EiffelStudio itself became open source.
So why the switch? There's one key difference between the FreeElks and EiffelStudio libraries - FreeElks will not have any dependencies on the EiffelStudio runtime. This will make it possible to use the same core kernel library library - with bug-for-bug compatibility - for both EiffelStudio and Eric's Gobo Eiffel Compiler.
Manu advises that the switch will take place "when elks compiles". Although freeelks is under active development, it may be a while yet before it's a "drop-in replacement".
Labels: eiffelstudio
posted by Roger Browne @ 14:02 
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Commenting on "with bug-for-bug compatibility", it will be for pure Eiffel code. Each compiler will have its own bug/behavior for routines which are marked `built_in'.
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