This site contains older material on Eiffel. For the main Eiffel page, see http://www.eiffel.com.

DLE: Dynamic Linking in Eiffel

DLE (Dynamic Linking in Eiffel) gives Eiffel developers the ability to integrate new classes into their systems at run time. This provides a new degree of flexibility to Eiffel development.

DLE will be particularly useful to large, mission-critical projects which need to respond in a few hours to new developments or changing market conditions. Based on early user experience it appears that financial systems will be a particularly important area of application (think for example of an reinsurance company that needs to respond in real time to requests for quotes, and to perform an immediate cost analysis of various models). Many other application areas are also predictable, e.g. compiling, telecommunications, CASE tools, health systems, etc.

DLE provides a unique contribution whenever you need both:

The optimal performance of finalized ISE Eiffel code (with dead code removal, automatic static binding, automatic inlining, array optimization etc.)

The ability to add elements to your software instantly - in particular, without going through any recompilation and in fact without interrupting execution. (Actually what you need to change may be determined by the execution itself.)

The DLE manual is available on line.