EiffelStudio: Software Construction & Correctness Built In

Overview

Most development environments help you write code. EiffelStudio helps you build software you can reason about, change safely, and trust over time. EiffelStudio is a software construction environment designed for teams who care about correctness, long-term maintainability, and control over complexity — not just short-term velocity. It is built around a simple idea: design, implementation, testing, and documentation should not be separate activities. They should be one continuous, coherent process.

What Makes EiffelStudio Fundamentally Different

Traditional toolchains rely on:

 • informal specifications
 • defensive programming
 • extensive testing after the fact
 • repeated rework when systems evolve

EiffelStudio takes a different approach. It embeds formal reasoning about software behavior directly into the language and the tools, so that many errors are prevented by construction — not discovered late, under pressure. This is not an add-on. It is the organizing principle of the environment.

One Continuous Lifecycle — No Throwaway Artifacts

With EiffelStudio, you do not:

 • model first and throw the model away
 • write documentation separately
 • rely on tests alone to understand intent
 • fear architectural changes

You work in one language and one environment from the earliest design decisions through implementation, testing, deployment, and long-term maintenance.

 • design remains live
 • contracts remain executable
 • documentation stays accurate because it is extracted from the software itself
 • change is expected — and controlled.

Correctness by Construction

At the core of EiffelStudio is Design by Contract™. Instead of hoping code behaves correctly, you state the rules explicitly:

 • what each component requires
 • what it guarantees
 • what must always remain true

These rules are:

 • checked automatically
 • enforced during execution
 • used directly by debugging and testing tools

As a result:

 • many bugs never occur
 • remaining bugs are localized and understandable
 • testing becomes targeted instead of blind

This is not “extra work”. It replaces defensive code, redundant tests, and ambiguous documentation.

Built for Systems That Can Last

EiffelStudio is designed for serious, long-lived software:

 • core business systems
 • infrastructure and backend services
 • safety-critical or high-reliability applications
 • platforms expected to evolve for years.

Key characteristics:

 • readable, unambiguous syntax that scales to large teams
 • strong static typing with dynamic binding — errors caught early without sacrificing flexibility
 • void safety, eliminating entire classes of runtime failures
 • powerful reuse mechanisms, including clean multiple inheritance and genericity

The result is software that remains understandable — even years later.

Performance and Portability Without Compromise

EiffelStudio produces high-performance executables, comparable to C/C++, while preserving high-level abstractions. Applications can be built for:

 • Windows (.NET)
 • Linux and Unix
 • MacOS
 • other supported platforms

without rewriting the system or debugging platform-specific behavior. “Write once, debug everywhere” is not acceptable. EiffelStudio is designed to avoid that trap.

For Teams Who Want Control, Not Chaos

EiffelStudio is not for everyone. It is for teams who:

 • are tired of chasing bugs downstream
 • want architectures that survive change
 • need predictable outcomes rather than heroic debugging
 • understand that clarity beats cleverness

If your priority is speed at any cost, there are many tools. If your priority is building software that stays correct as it grows, EiffelStudio is different by design.

Getting Started

EiffelStudio is available under a dual licensing model, supporting both commercial and open-source development. Download EiffelStudio and evaluate it on a real problem — not a toy example. That is where the difference becomes obvious. To get started, download EiffelStudio.

What can I do with it?

Develop core-business software applications that are scalable, long-lasting, advanced, adapatable and have high business value, whether you are in finance, defense, energy, healthcare or any other industry. EiffelStudio is also a solution of choice for Cloud Computing applications, allowing you to deploy your application on a server and enabling clients to access it remotely.

What’s in it for me?

Many software developers turn to EiffelStudio because they are not satisfied with many of the industry’s alternatives. A key driving point is that EiffelStudio has the unique ability to make their software development process predictable and controllable, thanks to a series of important value drivers:

Design by Contract™ and powerful debugging	Prevent 90% of the bugs from occurring in the first place – and what bugs remain are easily traced and repaired. Design by Contract is a unique mechanism that demands and simplifies the production of quality software. It ensures that your code will have substantially less errors because it follows “the rules” of development. Our customers tell us that because of Design by Contract, they can dramatically lower the number of bugs and spend more time designing. In short it makes programming fun again. Continue ...
Clean syntax	Create easy to read classes with Eiffel’s simple, unambiguous plain-English syntax. This greater readability makes the development and maintenance of large and/or multi-participant systems about 10 times easier.
Fast Executables	Eiffel is very performance-focused, and produces executables that are comparable in speed to C/C++ code with far less development effort or expertise required. Eiffel also employs system-wide optimizations that are not possible with other languages.
Seamless development	The best way to manage change in the development process. No more modeling, and then starting over again to design and implement. EiffelStudio allows you to model bulletproof software, design it, implement it, test it, deploy it, realizing the build-test-deploy process – in one continuous flow, within the same tool, in the same language. Continue ...
Automatic Testing	EiffelStudio is the only IDE that automates testing and finds the bugs for you. Continue ...
Void Safety	A guarantee that no object references will have null or void values. Continue ...
Parallel programming	Object-Oriented Programming without the pain. Continue ...
Reusable code	Allows to shorten development time by a factor of 2 to as much as 10 times and gives the opportunity for cost savings and productivity improvements that lie in the back end of software development.
Model-driven development	Many of the mechanisms that give Eiffel its power as a programming language double up as modeling facilities, applicable to the description of today’s complex systems independently of any computer implementation concerns. Continue ...
Multi-platform development	Allows you to create applications once and run them virtually anywhere. Not `create once, debug everywhere’ as you find in other “multi-platform” solutions. Compile to Windows (.NET), Unix, Linux, Mac OS X, Embedded, VMS …