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RE: [ProgSoc] Programming! Code!



On Wed, 2006-10-18 at 18:18 +1000, Nigel Sheridan-Smith wrote:

> It's a shame Eiffel never took off... mind you good compilers for Eiffel
> were too late to the game. I still remember the three phase Eiffel compiler
> on Solaris from 1997 (.e => .cxx => .c => 1+ Mb "hello world!" application).

Ah yes; that was a consequence of the task of making the Eiffel compiler
available for students having being delegated in 1995 to an undergrad
(interface room person) without the time having first been taken to
understand how the compiler works in the first place.

The ISE Eiffel compiler for Solaris was (is?) superb; sub-second compile
times, reasonable execution times. The problem was that, in the minds of
those responsible at socs.uts (now fit.uts?), a compiler was a thing
which took source code as input and produced an executable as output,
and that is what the undergrad was told to sort out (these melt/freeze
instructions are "too complicated", make a shellscript which converts a
source tree to an executable). Needless to say, this mode of operation
is not particularly efficient (it's not even recommended for production
use, unless there's a problem with the availability of dynamic
libraries, much less for development use) and led to compile times of
around 20 minutes when everyone was running it.

Colourful analogy; it was akin to towing a caravan with a Porsche and
then complaining about the lack of acceleration.

- Raz


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