Re: Noob First Post

[Raphael Mack]

Am Samstag, dem 27.11.2021 um 14:07 +0100 schrieb Eric Bezault:
> Fixed formatting issue in my previous message:
> 
> On 27/11/2021 11:44, Paolo Redaelli wrote:
>  > And adding GTK support
> 
> Note that there is already support for GTK in EiffelVision2
> (https://github.com/EiffelSoftware/libraries/tree/master/Src/library/vision2/implementation/gtk3
> ).
> So what would be nice is if Liberty Eiffel could support the
> ECMA Eiffel dialect, or at least the parts that are often used
> in third party Eiffel libraries. It would be so nice to be able
> to use Eiffel libraries that already exist out there without
> having to worry about what Eiffel compiler we use. This would
> avoid duplicating the work and focus on new Eiffel libraries and
> tools which are still missing.

In my eyes there are great features in ECMA (like dynamic type
conversion) which make Eiffel a bit more handy, while - on the other
side - I loved Eiffel especially because you know well what's going on
in your code. With convert simple-looking assignments could do a lot of
magic with hard to see side effects. With quite some experience in
safety related low level programming I always dreamed to see Eiffel in
this area and there it would be a nightmare to allow a simple
assignment to consume additional memory...

With that in mind I would have always tried to push towards supporting
new features in an "ECMA mode" while not using these in the core
library and supporting a conservative mode. But for sure, as soon as we
talk about GUIs with GTK or alike I see no issue with requiring the
modern stuff :-)

Today I admit, that Liberty is (at least) very dormant, so I don't want
to think about any restrictions and will support everything, that helps
the community! Adding new features is a great thing and everyone is
welcome to contribute, but we also have a test suite that is not
passing fully green, so I would not go for (too many) new features
before closing these bugs. This brings me also to the pleasant offers
for help from some people here: Every help is warmly welcome,
especially pull requests :-) but also every work on tickets and
discussion here about priorities is great!

Regards