Ecore 1.1.0 ****************************************************************************** FOR ANY ISSUES PLEASE EMAIL: enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net ****************************************************************************** Requirements: ------------- Must: libc libm eina (1.1.0 or better) (For windows you also need: evil) Recommended: libX11 libXext libXcursor libXprint libXinerama libXrandr libXss libXrender libXcomposite libXfixes libXdamage libXdpms libXtest GNUTLS or OpenSSL CURL evas (1.1.0 or better) Optional: XCB (fully working) SDL DirectFB glib tslib Ecore is a clean and tiny event loop library with many modules to do lots of convenient things for a programmer, to save time and effort. It's small and lean, designed to work on embedded systems all the way to large and powerful multi-cpu workstations. It serialises all system signals, events etc. into a single event queue, that is easily processed without needing to worry about concurrency. A properly written, event-driven program using this kind of programming doesn't need threads, nor has to worry about concurrency. It turns a program into a state machine, and makes it very robust and easy to follow. Ecore gives you other handy primitives, such as timers to tick over for you and call specified functions at particular times so the programmer can use this to do things, like animate, or time out on connections or tasks that take too long etc. Idle handlers are provided too, as well as calls on entering an idle state (often a very good time to update the state of the program). All events that enter the system are passed to specific callback functions that the program sets up to handle those events. Handling them is simple and other Ecore modules produce more events on the queue, coming from other sources such as file descriptors etc. Ecore also help you work in a multi threaded environment and setup a thread pool that help you use the EFL on multi-cpu system. It help split the part that can't be called outside of the ecore main loop from the computation heavy function that could run on another CPU. Be aware that Evas and most of Ecore API is not thread safe and should only be called in the main loop. Eina and Eet could be used, if done carefully, in any heavy function on another cpu. Ecore also lets you have functions called when file descriptors become active for reading or writing, allowing for streamlined, non-blocking IO. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ COMPILING AND INSTALLING: ./configure make (as root unless you are installing in your users directories): make install ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTE: You can experience main loop lock (and more likely see UI lock) if libcurl doesn't use an asynchronous dns resolver. Since Curl 7.21.0, you can use the native dns resolver asynchronously by turning --enable-threaded-resolver on during configure time. For older version, C-Ares is the way to solve that issue (see: http://c-ares.haxx.se/ ).