History

This project was officially started in 2006, after the experiences of its founder in the EWG project. He was contributing to the GTK2+ wrappers that are part of Andreas Leitner's Eiffel Wrapper Generator.
The goals of EWG are noble indeed ("EWG is ideal for creating cross-platform, cross-eiffel-compiler and cross-c-compiler C library wrappers") but AFAIK trying to support:

• three different operative systems: 

• Linux, 
• Windows,
• Mac OS X

• three different Eiffel compilers: 
• SmartEiffel, 
• ISE Eiffel and
• Visual Eiffel,
• four different C compilers: 
• the Gnu Compiler Collection
• Visual C++
• Borland C++
• lcc-win32

can be quite a complex affair.
Then we shall keep in count that

• ISE Eiffel was still proprietary software, 
• Visual Eiffel were quite behind the other two implementing the language and
• ISE and SmartEiffel implements different dialects of the same language that eventually diverged into two distinct languages

All these factors together make the effort of providing working wrappers of useful libraries quite difficult; at least all the "compatibility" requirements of EWG slow down the process considerably.
This interview of Berend de Boer clarifies one of the main issue that prevent Eiffel from becoming a widespread programming language:
"Another problem is the relative lack of class libraries, a problem Bezault admits is a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Developers are hesitant to work on Eiffel, given the relatively small number of libraries available. But without lots of developers working with the language, the libraries are slow to grow."
As this project aims to break this "vicious circle" and to make Eiffel a widespread language we have made the deliberate choice to support only one compiler. Since most of the libraries that are considered mostly useful were part of GNU project and that the founder believes in "Free software is a matter of liberty not price"  the natural choice was to support SmartEiffel, which is the Eiffel compiler of the GNU project.