Samsung/Enlightenment Developers Are Busy At Work On EFL 2.0

[tessio]

GTK 2 applications run just fine under Gnome 3.
Qt 4 applications run just fine under Plasma 5.

Don't make shit up.

That has nothing to do with what is being talked here..

[brrrrttttt]

Am I reading this right ?. They want to provide backward compatibility to EFL1. What a strange idea - ?.
It is time that the GTK and QT team take a look it how things work in the real world.

I think Qt has a rather large amount of "real world" experience. Check their customers and the _massive_ list of things built with Qt, commerical and open.

[Luke_Wolf]

You can always add new API while still supporting the older API. That allows existing applications to run. Unlike KDE and GNOME teams idea of completely throwing the old toolkit and replacing it with a new one. It is no wonder that the Linux desktop is stagnant in terms of the number of applications.

The misinformed comment of the year award goes to... Vasant1234... funny I thought it was going to go to birdie...

Qt and KDE are practically the pioneers of ABI stability in C++ (which is a stronger guarantee than API stability) and the notion that they throw away the old and replace it with a new one is nothing short of the purest form of idiocy. Qt has had a grand total of 4 ABI breaks over its 22 year lifespan, which is what the major version means. The major number changing doesn't magically mean that everything somehow changes, instead it's an opportunity to fix systemic issues with the toolkit that could break the ABI/API in some but not necessarily all of the toolkit. In reality the vast majority of the toolkit remains the same, for example there has been a whole 250 commits to QString.h since 2011 or inotherwords 35 a year that's pretty glacial and that's a core type that's pretty important to everyone. In reality as long as you weren't using anything particularly novel the Qt4->Qt5 transition is mostly source compatible and other than deprecating old ways of doing things and maybe getting rid of the MOC entirely a theoretical Qt6 is going to have even less breaking changes than Qt4->Qt5 did, because most things are mature and stable.What made KDE4-> KF5 so painful is not that they were changing to a new toolkit, it's not that the meat of the code had that big of a change, it's that they completely refactored kdelib to both upstream functionality into Qt and make it much more friendly to use outside of KDE, then they had to fix everything else to use the refactored version, and guess what? A theoretical KF6 because of the refactoring is going to break the API minimally.

Unless some new disruptive technology gets invented in the meantime like QML was during the Qt4->Qt5 era there's not going to be a major API breaking problem anymore.

Also KDE and Qt both have provided compat shims in their respective frameworks during the transition period which is all this is likely to be.

[faldzip]

To be honest I was thinking that EFL2 might become something usable but then read sentence about EFL1 backwards compatibility and my hope was gone...

And if you think EFL guys know how real world things work then search for EFL thread on dailywtf. Then you will know their real world is in some galaxy far far away...

[Awesomeness]

That has nothing to do with what is being talked here..

Sure it has. Let me give you the quote again: "That allows existing applications to run. Unlike KDE and GNOME". He claims that old applications can't run in the Gnome and KDE worlds. That's BS. He knows it. You know it.

[trek]

The misinformed comment of the year award goes to... Vasant1234... funny I thought it was going to go to birdie...
[........] In reality as long as you weren't using anything particularly novel the Qt4->Qt5 transition is mostly source compatible[...]

the news story and the commenter are talking about ABI compatibility (not API) between major version of EFL, a thing that is not possible with QT as you explain

how many libraries maintains a strict ABI compatibility? not much, but at first the libc and the opengl libraries, then some well written library like:

https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/expat/

https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/freeglut/

if you check instead something about gtk or qt you will see many api breaks not only between major version but also minor:

https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/gdk-pixbuf/

https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/gtk+/

https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/qt/

[brrrrttttt]

What makes Qt's ABI compatibility so impressive is that it's a __C++ API__, with ABI compatibility over a _large_ number of compilers from different vendors, with all manner of ABI breaking compiler bugs to work around. EFL do not even have to consider most of these issues.

[dkasak]

To be honest I was thinking that EFL2 might become something usable but then read sentence about EFL1 backwards compatibility and my hope was gone...

And if you think EFL guys know how real world things work then search for EFL thread on dailywtf. Then you will know their real world is in some galaxy far far away...

That thread has been thoroughly discredited, here ( possibly multiple times, from memory ), and in other places too. What kind of applications do you develop, out of interest? Got some work on github?

[molecule-eye]

Buy can they make it less UGLY?

[ssokolow]

That thread has been thoroughly discredited, here ( possibly multiple times, from memory ), and in other places too.

Citations? I tried digging into it last time I was told that but everything I dug up only seemed to reinforce it.