Online Eiffel Documentation
EiffelStudio

Melting Ice Technology

EiffelStudio relies on Melting Ice Technology, the proprietary compilation mechanism of Eiffel Software, which offers three forms of compilation:

Melting and freezing generate an executable in the EIFGENs|target_name|W_code subdirectory of the project directory. The executable is composed of a standard executable file named after the system, and of a <system name>.melted file, which is called the Eiffel update file. Although it is recommended to finalize the system when running it from outside EiffelStudio (since the performance is better), it is possible to launch a melted/frozen executable. However, the Eiffel update file is necessary, the executable alone will not run.

Basically, the Eiffel update file incorporates the changes that have been made to the system since it was last frozen. Therefore, it is very small when the system has just been frozen, and progressively becomes bigger each time the system is melted. On the contrary, the executable is only modified when the system is frozen, never when it is melted.

The contents of the Eiffel update file are in a byte code representation which is dynamically interpreted at run-time.