Re: embedded or real-time project using Eiffel

> But this will result again in a comparision of the current available
> runtime libraries. Do they allow multi threading, coroutines, signal
> handling etc.  For SmartEiffel the answer is clearley no and at least
> coroutines and signal handling is also not possible with EiffelStudio.
> At least this was with 5.3.

I'm not sure what is not working with EiffelStudio in the area of signal 
handling as we do support signals, they are just transformed into 
exceptions. And if you want to ignore a signal you have the UNIX_SIGNALS 
class for that (although called UNIX it works on Windows but with a 
restricted set of signals).

> Oh yes i forgot one very serious problem with Eiffel. It compiles to C
> and there is no way to tell the compiler to generate a "volatile"
> specifier for variables. I guess this alone is enough to say that the
> language itself will not work well with typical real-time and embedded
> uses. I asked exactly this question in this newsgroup before:
> 
>
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.eiffel/browse_thread/thread/15d2767018f297c1/af4f17416c6c8425?lnk=gst&q=llothar#af4f17416c6c8425

There is no such thing in Eiffel for the good reasons that it was evil 
from C to propose such a thing. Everything should have the semantic of 
volatile and only when the C compiler can assure at 100% that it is ok 
to not refetch data from memory can he do the optimization. That was the 
idea of the register keyword in the old days because compiler needed 
help to see if they didn't have to refetch but it looks like the C 
standard went in the complete opposite direction.

In Eiffel, the memory model being assumed is the one that you always 
fetch the data where it is. So there should not be any volatile issue.

And if you have data shared among threads, the literature will say that 
you should always use synchronization routines unless you can prove it 
otherwise by testing on your specific platform/C compiler.

Regards,
Manu