Build your library

We're not going to give a course in architectural concepts here, but we'll give the details of how the Liberty Eiffel utilities can help you write high quality libraries.

The simplest case is that of a "100% Eiffel" library. In this case, Liberty Eiffel provides its compiler and its standard library, which already contains a rich variety of features.

Liberty Eiffel also provides a documentation utility: eiffeldoc.

In certain cases, a library must be able to interface with the underlying system, to get access to low level functions. One can imagine, for example, creating an audio library (sorry, these days one says "multimedia"), to make system calls to access the sound card.

Liberty Eiffel provides a powerful utility: plugins. You can also use, even though it has been superseded, an older mechanism, externals.

There are also two other mechanisms: inlining and cecil.

For more in-depth background information about building reusable software components and libraries, check out reference "RS 1994" on the Bibliography page.