

EFL 1.8 (Enlightenment Foundation Library) is out - conductor
https://phab.enlightenment.org/phame/live/3/post/efl_1_8/

======
pavlov
_We have merged Ecore, Edje, Eet, Eeze, Efreet, Eina, Eio, Embryo, Emotion,
Ethumb, Evas and Evil into a single EFL package._

This embodies a lot of what bothers me about Linux UI projects.

Enlightenment has always seemed interesting, but it's also very opaque. The
announcement contains one external link to EFL, and I tried to follow that
link to find out what all this strangely named stuff might be, but it lead to
a site that required a login.

Elsewhere in the announcement, they mention that they're building a new object
system called Eo (props for the Michael Jackson reference, I guess). Of course
every Linux UI project already has one of those, with Qt and Gtk+ being the
most notable ones with truly sprawling object systems. Why is Enlightenment
inventing another one? They don't say, and they don't compare their own take
to any of the existing ones either.

All this gives the impression that Enlightenment is partying like it's 1999 on
the Linux desktop, while the world has moved on.

~~~
conductor
Yet it is being used in Tizen mobile platform, also by Electrolux and Samsung.
They are working hard and there are some new nice features in this release:

It now fully supports [0] Wayland 1.3

New library Eldbus for using the DBus API

New library Ephysics, which allows using Bullet Physics Engine features in EFL
way

New library Ecore Audio for working with audio

New widget theme Elementary

The Evas rendering engine is now working in async. mode preventing UI from
hanging

New object model Eo which unifies the access to EFL objects

More information about the libraries can be found at
[http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en](http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=about&l=en)

[0] -
[https://phab.enlightenment.org/w/wayland/](https://phab.enlightenment.org/w/wayland/)

~~~
pavlov
Thanks for the reply, it's definitely interesting stuff.

Why invent Eo to unify the EFL object models, rather than standardizing on
something that would be compatible with the common Linux GUI platforms? It
seems like a total waste of time to reinvent something like a DBus access
library, when this kind of basic plumbing work has been done a dozen times
already... With a compatible object system, Enlightenment could build on
existing and widely-used libraries from Gnome or Qt.

What exactly is Tizen going to be, and how does Enlightenment factor into it?
Ever since the first Tizen announcement, it was said that HTML5 will be its
userland API. Are native Enlightenment apps also supported on some devices?

Is Tizen reincarnating the strange twisty path of WebOS - moving beyond
smartphones to trying its luck on all sorts of embedded widgets? Using Tizen
on Electrolux machines sounds rather like HP's plan to use WebOS on
printers...

------
ahknight
E is still around? Damn.

