Underneath the hood it mixes compilation and interpretation to give good performance in stable parts of the system and fast turnaround for those parts still being debugged. Data structure libraries are included. Libraries and tools for parsing, database storage, GUI development are available, along with a CASE tool. It is cheap, but you only get a compiler, a class documentation generator and some data structure libraries. The compiler also comes with two garbage collectors.
Users can pick the appropriate one for their application.
Eiffel provides facilities for the creation of reliable, well-defined modules and packages. Eiffel's use of garbage collection prevents many bugs and improves modularity. Eiffel environments can generate reference documentation from source code, avoiding the need to maintain documents in parallel. The Language'', by Bertrand Meyer is a combined reference manual and tutorial, but new users will find it heavy going. An Introduction'' by Robert Switzer is probably the best tutorial for new users.