Gobo Eiffel Project

One of the main concerns of the Gobo Eiffel Project is to provide the Eiffel community with Eiffel tools and libraries that are free and portable across various Eiffel compilers available on the market. That way, you can still use your favorite Eiffel compiler while taking advantage of the goodies included in Gobo Eiffel.

The software included in this package is copyrighted freeware distributed under the terms and conditions of the MIT License as specified in file License.txt. Gobo Eiffel is a multi-developer open-source project whose development is hosted at Github while the official site (for stable releases) is located at gobosoft.com. This package also contains files from the Boehm GC project which is also released under a MIT-style license.

Gobo Eiffel already consists of seventeen Eiffel libraries:

• Gobo Eiffel Argument Library
• Gobo Eiffel Kernel Library
• Gobo Eiffel Lexical Library
• Gobo Eiffel Math Library
• Gobo Eiffel Parse Library
• Gobo Eiffel Pattern Library
• Gobo Eiffel Regexp Library
• Gobo Eiffel String Library
• Gobo Eiffel Structure Library
• Gobo Eiffel Test Library
• Gobo Eiffel Thread Library
• Gobo Eiffel Time Library
• Gobo Eiffel Tools Library
• Gobo Eiffel Utility Library
• Gobo Eiffel XML Library
• Gobo Eiffel XPath Library
• Gobo Eiffel XSLT Library

and twelve utilities:

• Gobo Eiffel Ant (geant)
• Gobo Eiffel Compiler (gec)
• Gobo Eiffel C Compilation (gecc)
• Gobo Eiffel Cop (gecop)
• Gobo Eiffel Doc (gedoc)
• Gobo Eiffel Image (geimage)
• Gobo Eiffel Lex (gelex)
• Gobo Eiffel Lint (gelint)
• Gobo Eiffel Preprocessor (gepp)
• Gobo Eiffel Test (getest)
• Gobo Eiffel XSLT Processor (gexslt)
• Gobo Eiffel Yacc (geyacc)

Note that these utilities are not needed if you just want to use the library classes provided in this package.

Eiffel compilers

The supported Eiffel compilers, in alphabetical order, are:

• Gobo Eiffel Compiler (gec) 21.01.09.4
• ISE Eiffel 21.11.10.6046 (Classic and .NET)

For more details about the supported Eiffel compilers, please see the file Release_notes.md. This software might work with other Eiffel compilers and/or other compiler versions, however no test has been made yet. To have a better understanding of the way this software has been designed and implemented, you can also have a look at portability issues.

Platforms

The software provided in this distribution should work on any platform where supported Eiffel compilers are available. However this software has only been tested under Windows 10 and Linux. Since most Eiffel compilers use the notation $NAME for environment variables in their ECF files (or equivalent), this convention has been used instead of the Windowish %NAME%. Likewise, the directory separator used throughout this distribution is /, following Unix/Linux convention instead of the Windows \ separator.

To install this package, please follow the instructions below:

Under Windows

• Download the package gobo*-src.7z, or check-out the files from the Git repository.

• Copy the files to a directory of your choice on your disk and set the environment variable %GOBO% to that directory, known as the distribution directory. Also put the directory %GOBO%\bin in your PATH.

• To build the tools (e.g. gec, geyacc, ...), execute the script:

    %GOBO%\bin\install.bat <c_compiler>
  

  where <c_compiler> is a C compiler installed on your computer (for example use msc for Microsoft C compiler).

Under Unix/Linux

• Download the package gobo*-src.tar.gz, or check-out the files from the Git repository.

• Copy the files to a directory of your choice on your disk and set the environment variable $GOBO to that directory, known as the distribution directory. Also put the directory $GOBO/bin in your PATH.

• To build the tools (e.g. gec, geyacc, ...), execute the script:

    $GOBO/bin/install.sh <c_compiler>
  

  where <c_compiler> is a C compiler installed on your computer (for example use gcc for GNU C compiler).

Feedback

A list of the known defects along with eventual bug fixes or workarounds is available in the issue tracker on GitHub (an older bug tracker is available on SourceForge). If you find a bug which does not appear in this list yet, please report it. We will try to provide a bug fix as soon as possible (usually within one or two days).

There is a mailing list (hosted at SourceForge) for discussions about the features under development in the Git repository on GitHub. You can subscribe and take part to the discussions or ask your questions there.

Although the license allows you to do pretty much whatever you want with this software, we would be grateful to get your feedback, bug reports and/or bug fixes, improvements, etc. so that others could benefit from your work and ideas as well. We would also be interested in hearing about your projects and how easy (or difficult) it was to adapt this software for your specific needs. Thank you in advance.

You are also welcome to take part in the development of the Gobo Eiffel Project. Some developer guidelines are available to help you make the first steps.

Authors

Copyright (c) 1997-2024, Eric Bezault and others