Visual Eiffel is an implementation of the Eiffel programming language

Eiffel (programming language)

Eiffel is an ISO-standardized, object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer and Eiffel Software. The design of the language is closely connected with the Eiffel programming method...

 developed and distributed by Object Tools GmbH, a German company.

Visual Eiffel provides an integrated development environment

Integrated development environment

An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...

 running on Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

. A major design goal is to provide an environment that, unlike EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio is a development environment for the Eiffel programming language developed and distributed by Eiffel Software.EiffelStudio includes a combination of tools integrated under a single user interface: compiler, interpreter, debugger, browser, metrics tool, profiler, diagram tool...

, does not use an original user interface paradigm but instead is comfortable to programmers familiar with such tools as Microsoft

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's Visual Studio and Borland

Borland

Borland Software Corporation is a software company first headquartered in Scotts Valley, California, Cupertino, California and finally Austin, Texas. It is now a Micro Focus subsidiary. It was founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad and Philippe Kahn.-The 1980s:...

's Delphi

Borland Delphi

Embarcadero Delphi is an integrated development environment for console, desktop graphical, web, and mobile applications.Delphi's compilers use its own Object Pascal dialect of Pascal and generate native code for 32- and 64-bit Windows operating systems, as well as 32-bit Mac OS X and iOS...

.

Visual Eiffel includes a "Display Machine" for developing GUI applications.

While many other Eiffel compilers generate C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

 bytecode

Bytecode

Bytecode, also known as p-code , is a term which has been used to denote various forms of instruction sets designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter as well as being suitable for further compilation into machine code...

 or bytecode for .NET

.NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...

, the Visual Eiffel compiler generates native X86 code.

The compiler (not the graphical environment) is, besides Windows, also available on Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

.

Licencing is free for personal use (with banner) or commercial, with the core GPL.

Visual Eiffel web site