Re: Liberty

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 09:47:47PM +0100, Cyril ADRIAN wrote:
> Dear Eiffel users, hackers, and believers,
> 
> We are happy to announce the birth Liberty Eiffel.
> 
> Liberty Eiffel is born from a simple idea: the Open Source and Free
> Software community needs a free-as-in-freedom Eiffel compiler that
> tries to be follow the principles that made Eiffel so appealing.
> 
> SmartEiffel is an academic project; as such it is a tool for its
> developers to test and prove ideas that made their way into papers;
> such a goal naturally requires the development model to follow the
> rules of the academia, for example keeping all the coding in-house.
> 
> We are designing and developing an Eiffel compiler, compatible with
> SmartEiffel, but with different goals:
> 
> - keep the language and the required run-time system as simple as
>   possible;
> 
> - stick to the same high quality requirements that make SmartEiffel
>   such a good piece of Free Software;
> 
> - "exit the ivory tower", being a community-driven project without the
>   requirements of academic goals; being easily or automatically
>   interoperable with most mainstream languages (C, Java, .NET...) is
>   an absolute need;

Do have a look at Modula 3's run-time system.  Of the languages I've 
seen supporting multithreading and garbage collection, Modula 3's 
run-time system is among the best I've seen.  I'd love to see it used 
for more language implementations, and I'd love to see some measure of 
interoperability between Modula 3 and Eiffel, two of my favourite 
languages.

> 
> - "stand on the shoulder of giants", using the Low Level Virtual
>   Machine compier infrastructure (http://www.llvm.org) for the
>   backend;

Last I looked, llvm had serious problems informing garbage collectors 
what the types of temporaries and stored registers were.  C-- did better 
on this, but its development and support seem to have slowed to a 
snail's pace.

> 
> - "provide the batteries", without "reinveinting the wheel"; the best
>   compiler in the world is useless without a wide set of libraries;
>   there is a huge set of free-as-in-freedom libraries that many
>   programmers and developers would like to use in Eiffel;

There's quite a few in Modula 3, too, one of the reasons I'm hoping for 
interoperability.

> 
> - give simple technical means to add more bindings and/or wrappers;
> 
> - maintain a simple and understandable design, striving to write the
>   most excellent Eiffel code;
> 
> - be available on most platforms.

Modula 3 is.

> 
> Liberty is a community-driven project. You are invited to participate
> and test your own ideas. It's very easy: the code is shared on github.
> 
> Liberty is only beginning. We need you.
> 
>     http://liberty-eiffel.blogspot.com/
>     http://github.com/tybor/Liberty
> 
> Happy hacking,
> --
> Paolo Redaelli & Cyril Adrian

-- hendrik