Dear Eiffel users, hackers, and believers,

We are happy to announce the birth of 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 follow the principles that made Eiffel so appealing.

SmartEiffel was an academic project; as such it was 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;

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

- "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;

- 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.

Liberty is a community-driven project. We invite you 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