EFL 1.0 Is Finally Released 115
Lisandro writes "The Enlightenment crew has finally released the first version of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which the E17 desktop is built on."
Adds reader mu22le:
"Among the Enlightenment libraries hitting version 1.0 are Eina (core data structure), Eet (data encode/decode and storage), Evas (canvas and scenegraph rendering ), Ecore (core mainloop, display abstraction and utility), Embryo (small virtual machine and compiler), Edie (GUI layout and animation), E_Dbus, Efreet (handling of freedesktop.org standards), and Eeze (udev wrapping)."
Getting it right can take a while -- a preview of the EFL libraries first appeared in 2004. Enlightenment has never stopped looking cool.
Re:Enlightenment's utility (Score:5, Interesting)
It may have taken 10 years to 'get right' (or close to it) but the end result is, frankly, quite impressive.
Did it take 10 years to "get it right", or did it merely take 10 years for the competition to blast by in terms of bloat and overhead, making E17 look better simply because it hasn't gotten worse anywhere nearly as quickly? :)
This is an honest question, as I haven't followed E development at all. I do basically agree with the conclusion--E17 once seemed huge, bloated and slow, and now it seems small, effective and fast. Clearly the devs were doing something right along the way, even if it was simply not adding new kitchen sinks every year or two.
Well okay (Score:4, Interesting)
I am a former openmoko user. I developed openmoko apps using EFL as well. There is a lot of stuff missing from EFL. A lot of stuff which is not documented. There are many situations where you just have to try something and if it doesn't work, try something else. A good component set will have documentation telling you what components can be embedded in other components. In many cased with EFL you have to go to the code or write a test to find out. Interoperability between components seems to have been developed on an "as needed" basis. A lot of the error messages written to stdout are unprofessionally written and uninformative. Its easy to generate a crash. I just can't see this going anywhere.