EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio is a development environment for the Eiffel programming language developed and distributed by Eiffel Software.

EiffelStudio includes a combination of tools integrated under a single user interface: compiler, interpreter, debugger, browser, metrics tool, profiler, diagram and code inspector tool. The user interface rests on a number of specific UI paradigms, in particular "pick-and-drop" for effective browsing.

EiffelStudio is available on a number of platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Solaris, VMS, RaspberryPi. The source is available under GPL; other commercial licenses are also available.

EiffelStudio is an open-source development with beta versions of the next release made regularly available.

The Eiffel community actively participates in its development; its official website is Eiffel.org, where projects and resources are listed. The source code base is usually available for check-out via Subversion or Git. Also available are discussion forums and the like.

As of January 2017, the last released version was 17.01. Successive beta releases are regularly available.

EiffelStudio uses a specific compilation technology known as Melting Ice (claimed by Eiffel Software as a trademark) which integrates compilation proper with interpretation of the elements changed since the last compilation, for very fast turnaround (recompilation time proportional to the size of the change, not the size of the overall program). Although such "melted" programs can be delivered, the common practice is to perform a "finalization" step before release. Finalization is a highly optimized form of compilation, which takes longer but generates optimized executables.

The interpreter part of EiffelStudio relies on a bytecode-oriented virtual machine. The compiler generates either C or .NET CIL (Common Intermediate Language).

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