Dear Eiffel users, hackers, and believers, We are happy to announce the birth of Liberty Eiffel. Liberty Eiffel is born from a simple idea: the Open Source and Free Software community needs a free-as-in-freedom Eiffel compiler that tries to follow the principles that made Eiffel so appealing. SmartEiffel was an academic project; as such it was a tool for its developers to test and prove ideas that made their way into papers; such a goal naturally requires the development model to follow the rules of the academia, for example keeping all the coding in-house. We are designing and developing an Eiffel compiler, based on SmartEiffel, but with different goals: - keep the language and the required run-time system as simple as possible; - stick to the same high quality requirements that made SmartEiffel such a good piece of Free Software; - "exit the ivory tower", being a community-driven project without the requirements of academic restructions; being easily or automatically interoperable with most mainstream languages (C, Java, .NET...) is an absolute need; - "stand on the shoulder of giants", using the Low Level Virtual Machine compiler infrastructure (http://www.llvm.org) for the backend; - "provide the batteries", without "reinveinting the wheel"; the best compiler in the world is useless without a wide set of libraries; there is a huge set of free-as-in-freedom libraries that many programmers and developers would like to use in Eiffel; - give simple technical means to add more bindings and/or wrappers; - maintain a simple and understandable design, striving to write the most excellent Eiffel code; - be available on most platforms. Liberty is a community-driven project. We invite you to participate and test your own ideas. It's very easy: the code is shared on github. Liberty is currently in its second release. We need you to push the product forward. https://www.liberty-eiffel.org http://liberty-eiffel.blogspot.com/ http://github.com/tybor/Liberty Happy hacking, -- Paolo Redaelli & Cyril Adrian