Compiling EiffelStudio


Installing EiffelStudio

To compile EiffelStudio, you need an already working EiffelStudio compiler on your machine. The current source tree requires at least version 15.01 of EiffelStudio. You can download it from Downloads. Read the existing documentation to install EiffelStudio.

Note: on Windows you will need the Microsoft C compiler to compile Eiffel Studio. How to install the free version of the Microsoft C compiler: Installing Microsoft C compiler. It is not possible to compile EiffelStudio with the MinGW C compiler (GCC).

Compilation methods

Currently there are two compilation methods.

Extracting source code

Before checking out the source code, make sure to configure subversion properly using the following instructions.

Checking out from SVN

  1. Point the environment variables called EIFFEL_SRC and ISE_LIBRARY to the directory where you want to compile EiffelStudio.
    Usually we use the XXdev convention for this directory name - where XX is the version number of the currently developed version of the compiler.
  2. Make sure that ISE_EIFFEL, ISE_PLATFORM and ISE_C_COMPILER (on Windows only) are properly defined. ISE_EIFFEL should point to the directory where you installed EiffelStudio, ISE_PLATFORM is the name of your platform (see our documentation website for more details) and ISE_C_COMPILER is only for the Windows platforms and it has to be msc (Visual Studio). At this time we do not support mingw (GCC) on Windows due to Microsoft specific dependencies.
  3. Perform the following checkout procedures:


DOS

set SVNURL=https://svn.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/trunk
svn co %SVNURL%/Src 15.01_dev
svn co %SVNURL%/free_add_ons 15.01_dev/free_add_ons

Bash

export SVNURL=https://svn.eiffel.com/eiffelstudio/trunk
svn co $SVNURL/Src 15.01_dev
svn co $SVNURL/free_add_ons 15.01_dev/free_add_ons


To update the source files to the latest revision, perform the following steps:

Bash and DOS

cd 15.01_dev
svn up
svn up free_add_ons

Compiling C libraries

Compiling run-time on Windows

DOS

cd %EIFFEL_SRC%/C
configure [win32|win64] [b|g|m|m6]

Bash

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/C
./configure.bat [win32|win64] [b|g|m|m6]

The first argument indicated whether you are compiling the run-time for 32 or 64 bits. The second one is to tell which C compiler will be used. For now only `b' (Borland), `g' (MinGW), `m' (Microsoft) and `m6' (for those forced to use Microsoft VC++ 6.0) are officially supported.

On Windows 32 bits to clean up all the generated files (including the library files needed by EiffelStudio) it suffices to do:

DOS

configure clean

Bash

./configure.bat clean

Compiling run-time on Unix

The command is simply:

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/C
./quick_configure

This requires that ISE_PLATFORM is properly defined. The `quick_configure' script will look for the file CONFIGS/$ISE_PLATFORM and use it to extract the platform specific information to compile the run-time. If not found then an error will be reported.

To clean up the generated files including the library files needed by EiffelStudio:

make clobber

Compiling C code from libraries

Here is the list of commands to compile all required C libraries on Windows:

DOS

cd %EIFFEL_SRC%\library\net\Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%\library\vision2\Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%\library\wel\Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%\library\cURL\Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%\library\web_browser\Clib
finish_freezing -library

Bash

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/net/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/vision2/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/wel/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/cURL/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/web_browser/Clib
finish_freezing -library

On Unix it is slightly different:

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/net/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/vision2/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/vision2/implementation/gtk/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/library/cURL/Clib
finish_freezing -library

Make sure that ISE_EIFFEL is set correctly to your current "EiffelStudio" installation!

Compiling C code from C_library

This is only required on Windows to read PNG file. On Unix, this is not required because it is included in GTK+2.4. So on Windows, simply do the following:

DOS

cd %EIFFEL_SRC%/C_library/zlib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%/C_library/libpng
finish_freezing -library

Bash

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/C_library/zlib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/C_library/libpng
finish_freezing -library

Compiling C code from compiler

This is only required on Windows as this C code is a tiny wrapper around the Microsoft C++ API to generate and to debug .NET code.

To compile it, you first need to install the Microsoft .NET SDK. You can download it from their website.

After installing it, you need to update your LIB and INCLUDE environment variable to include the path the lib and include directory of the .NET Framework SDK.

Once properly installed, you can do:

DOS

cd %EIFFEL_SRC%/framework/cli_writer/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd %EIFFEL_SRC%/framework/cli_debugger/Clib
finish_freezing -library

Bash

cd $EIFFEL_SRC/framework/cli_writer/Clib
finish_freezing -library
cd $EIFFEL_SRC/framework/cli_debugger/Clib
finish_freezing -library

Compiling EiffelStudio

Now that we have taken care of the C code compilation we can compile the compiler. We assume that ec is in your path.

The configuration file of the compiler contains two active targets:

  • batch: for the command line compiler.
  • bench: for the graphical compiler, aka EiffelStudio.

Go to $EIFFEL_SRC/Eiffel/Ace and type the following command and replace target_name with either batch or bench.

ec -config ec.ecf -target target_name -c_compile

Mac OS X specific

Get a mac binary from here, then follow the instructions for unix.

Launching the Compiler

There are two ways of launching the compiler:

  1. Command line compiler: add the following arguments -config path_to_config_file.ecf. This will compile the project represented by `path_to_config_file.ecf'
  2. Graphical compiler (aka EiffelStudio): add the following argument -gui.