First Steps

Introduction

The source code of EiffelStudio was recently made open in a dual licensing model. This makes it possible for a broad group of developers to both learn from and extend the huge code base that embodies EiffelStudio. This article tries to give a good initial understanding behind the most basic ideas of the EiffelStudio implementation and shows how some example extensions have been integrated into the compiler.

Overview

EiffelStudio is first and foremost a compiler that translates programs written in the Eiffel language into different output formats where one of them is C code. To study a translation process it is important to understand both the source and the target language. The former is a perquisite for this article. In the first section of the code generated by the compiler will be explained. After that, some critical components of EiffelStudio will be analysed. After that the articel gets more tutorial like and shows how and where some extensions were integrated.