/work/announce.txt

 1Dear Eiffel users, hackers, and believers,
 2
 3We are happy to announce the birth of Liberty Eiffel.
 4
 5Liberty Eiffel is born from a simple idea: the Open Source and Free
 6Software community needs a free-as-in-freedom Eiffel compiler that
 7tries to follow the principles that made Eiffel so appealing.
 8
 9SmartEiffel was an academic project; as such it was a tool for its
10developers to test and prove ideas that made their way into papers;
11such a goal naturally requires the development model to follow the
12rules of the academia, for example keeping all the coding in-house.
13
14We are designing and developing an Eiffel compiler, compatible with
15SmartEiffel, but with different goals:
16
17- keep the language and the required run-time system as simple as
18  possible;
19
20- stick to the same high quality requirements that make SmartEiffel
21  such a good piece of Free Software;
22
23- "exit the ivory tower", being a community-driven project without the
24  requirements of academic goals; being easily or automatically
25  interoperable with most mainstream languages (C, Java, .NET...) is
26  an absolute need;
27
28- "stand on the shoulder of giants", using the Low Level Virtual
29  Machine compiler infrastructure (http://www.llvm.org) for the
30  backend;
31
32- "provide the batteries", without "reinveinting the wheel"; the best
33  compiler in the world is useless without a wide set of libraries;
34  there is a huge set of free-as-in-freedom libraries that many
35  programmers and developers would like to use in Eiffel;
36
37- give simple technical means to add more bindings and/or wrappers;
38
39- maintain a simple and understandable design, striving to write the
40  most excellent Eiffel code;
41
42- be available on most platforms.
43
44Liberty is a community-driven project. We invite you to participate
45and test your own ideas. It's very easy: the code is shared on github.
46
47Liberty is only beginning. We need you.
48
49    http://liberty-eiffel.blogspot.com/
50    http://github.com/tybor/Liberty
51
52Happy hacking,
53--
54Paolo Redaelli & Cyril Adrian