Getting Started

Prepared Debian/Ubuntu packages

On http://apt.liberty-eiffel.org/ we have prepared some Debian/Ubuntu packages. For the quick start using the last stable release do:

• add the following repository (note: it is currently unsigned)

deb http://apt.liberty-eiffel.org/ release main

• then install (as root or with sudo)

apt-get install liberty-eiffel-all

That's it, you now can run "se c" to compile your first program.

Windows Installer

In a 2016 GSoC project Petru Gurita worked on a Windows installer using NSIS. His repository is hosted on GitHub.

Since October 2024, an installation script exists that loosely mimics the 'install.sh' script that is used on Linux based machines. The installation process is documented on a separate page: Installing on Windows using the Tiny-C compiler This Windows cmd-script only assumes that you have a Tiny-C compiler installed - no need to download and run external installation packages.

Bootstrap from tarball

Download the <release>.tar.gz from http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/liberty-eiffel unpack it with

tar -zxvf <release>.tar.gz

bootstrap Liberty with

cd <release>
./install.sh -bootstrap

This will create a default liberty configuration in ~/.config/liberty-eiffel/, bootstrap the compiler and compile all the tools. Afterwards you just need to add <LibertyHome>/target/bin to your path, e. g. in .bashrc:

PATH=$PATH:~/<release>/target/bin
export PATH

Bootstrap from git source

On Linux (and most other Unix-like systems) installation of Liberty from source is simple:

Check that the following Pre-requisites are available on your system:

• git
• GCC compiler
• castxml (or GCC-XML)
• Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector dev-packages

On debian-like systems you may install them with:

sudo apt-get install git build-essential castxml libgc-dev

On Fedora you'll need gc-devel, rather than libgc-dev, castxml and of course the basic packages for compiling like gcc, git etc.

Now clone the repository:

git clone git://git.sv.gnu.org/liberty-eiffel.git

Change into the directory you created by this:

cd liberty-eiffel

and execute

./install.sh -bootstrap

This will create a default liberty configuration in ~/.config/liberty-eiffel/, bootstrap the compiler and compile all the tools. Afterwards you just need to add <LibertyHome>/target/bin to your path, e. g. in .bashrc:

PATH=$PATH:~/liberty-eiffel/target/bin
export PATH

Please note that no legacy SmartEiffel system should be installed on your system. Particularily, any /etc/serc file will prevent you from installing Liberty Eiffel correctly. Now you can call se as interface for all tools. For examples go to

cd <LibertyHome>/tutorial

and compile with

se compile hello_world.e -o hello_world

your first Liberty Eiffel program.

After this great success, play with the language, tools and libraries. Develop cool applications and for any question, suggestion or complaint get in touch with us. We are also happy to receive pull requests and provide accounts to this wiki if you want to contribute code or documentation. Be welcome to get involved.