People



The SmartEiffel Team

The SmartEiffel Team is an informal group of people in the LORIA lab of Nancy, France, gathered around the development of new compilation techniques for object-oriented languages and their implementation in SmartEiffel, The GNU Eiffel compiler.

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Dominique COLNET
Professor at the University of Nancy 2 (I.U.T. Charlemagne). Leader of the SmartEiffel project.

Dominique COLNET is the one who initiated the SmartEiffel project in Summer 1994. His goal was to validate on a large scale project new compilation techniques for object-oriented languages (global system analysis as well as dynamic type prediction). Another goal was also to create a free Eiffel compiler available for teaching as well as for industrial purpose. Initially called SmallEiffel, the first free Eiffel compiler was experimented in 1995 at the ESIAL school of software engineering. Dominique COLNET is still teaching Eiffel at ESIAL and he is always ready to visit new places in order to promote Eiffel. Since 2002, Dominique COLNET is an active member of the ECMA normalization group for the Eiffel language (ECMA TC39-TG4). See also the history page for more information on the chronology of the SmartEiffel project.

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Philippe RIBET
Developer on the SmartEiffel project.

He started working on SmallEiffel before the first public release and never stop to use and debug the compiler (mainly the library). He made the first port on non-UNIX system: MS-DOS. He joined the SmallEiffel team in summer 2001, working full-time on the project. The main aim is to develop the graphic library. He worked on other aspects like SCOOP for example.

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Cyril ADRIAN
Developer on the SmartEiffel project.

Like Philippe, he started working on SmallEiffel before it was brought to the public. Having learnt Eiffel at school, he never stopped using SmallEiffel and now SmartEiffel. He joined the SmartEiffel team in summer 2002, working on the project in his free time. He developed a new installer, added the Acyclic Visitor design pattern, and worked on the first implementation of SCOOP.

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Vincent CROIZIER
PhD student at LORIA.

He began to work on SmallEiffel in 1997, when he was a student at ENS Cachan. He fixed some bugs during his work experiments.
He joined the SmartEiffel team in winter 2003. Mathematician, he began to rewrite the NUMBER library and MUTABLE_BIG_INTEGER.
His project is to build tools to help users to enhance their contracts and make their software safer (with improved performance).

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Frederic MERIZEN
PhD student at LORIA.

He joined the SmartEiffel team for his master thesis in 2003, working on weak references and other garbage collection aspects with Olivier Zendra. Frederic got involved with the compiler itself during the last stages of SmartEiffel 2.0's long maturation process.

Former Team Members

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Suzanne COLLIN
Assistant Professor at the University Henri Poincaré of Nancy.

Suzanne COLLIN has been working on SmartEiffel from the very beginning, taking a major part in conceptual and design discussions and decisions.
She also provided the invaluable point of view of a user of object-oriented languages working in the field of image processing and augmented reality.
She also gave Dominique three beautiful childrens :)

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Philippe COUCAUD
Master Thesis about garbage collection in OO languages. Currently working in industry.

After being a student of Dominique, and in charge of the Macintosh-ready versions of SmallEiffel during his free-time since 1996, Philippe joined the SmallEiffel team of the ECOO research team between February and September 1998 for his Master thesis. He worked more especially on the garbage collector.

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Olivier ZENDRA
Researcher at INRIA-Lorraine / LORIA. Got his PhD "Translation and global optimisation in class languages" working on the SmartEiffel project.

He started working during most of his spare time with Dominique on SmallEiffel in late 1994 - early 1995. He had many important conceptual and technical discussions with Dominique about languages, typing, ANSI C, Java byte-code, garbage collection, etc. and worked on the first bootstrap. He also tries to maintain the SmartEiffel Web site. He joined the ECOO research team in late 1997 to work almost full-time for his PhD on SmallEiffel, which he got with highest honours in late 2000.

Other Contributors

Many people have contributed to SmartEiffel, The GNU Eiffel Compiler.

The first of them, in chronological order, are the computer science students of the University Henri Poincaré of Nancy, France. They tested and bench-marked it, providing very useful information in the early days of SmartEiffel.

Then, many people, either working in computer engineering or computer science, or simply users working in various academic and business fields, took part in the process of improving SmartEiffel. Since it became The GNU Eiffel Compiler, in early 1998, even more people are helping its development.

We want to thank all these people who help us in this great adventure. Although it is not possible to mention them all, here is a short list of the most important contributors.

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Copyright © Dominique COLNET and Suzanne COLLIN - <SmartEiffel@loria.fr>
Last modified: Thu Jul 22 17:22:05 CEST 2004