Enlightened


  • area_pol

    I work for a certain corporation which uses a certain product. This is its story. To put the quality of this product into perspective, let me say it’s been in development for about 20 years and has pretty much no users (besides my corp and some “hey - let’s make our own Linux crappy distro, which no one will ever use” fanatics) and no community. It was written by a C programmer who “doesn’t like the notion of ‘type’ in programming”. Let that be a prelude of what’s to follow. Envy those who don’t know it; pity those who use it.

    The product is called Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and it’s the absolutely worst piece of shit software you can imagine. In many years of my programming career I’ve never seen something that bad, including every TDWTF CodeSOD (yes, I’ve seen them all). EFL is a set of libraries which pretend to be a worthy replacement for Qt or GTK. In essence, it’s a bunch of hacks you can (try to) use to make windows/widgets/etc. The first thing a programmer notes while using EFL is that almost nothing works. Upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that things can be forced to somewhat work with a bunch of hacks. Let’s get into an example – creating a window with a background.

    Using Qt, one would write:

    auto widget = new QWidget{parent};
    widget->show();
    

    2 lines, all obvious, all working as expected. In EFL the workflow to achieving the same effect is as follows (code intentionally not supplied to save you from cerebral hemorrhage, and to show the Way of EFL):

    1. Create a window.
    2. Show the window.
    3. Notice nothing gets shown and no error logs.
    4. Spend hours googling/debugging and finally create a second object of type “bg” (background) with the window as parent and then show the window.
    5. Notice nothing gets shown and no error logs.
    6. Spend hours googling/debugging and finally also show the bg, despite later showing the window as a whole.

    Oh, did I mention the documentation is shit and some bits are in a form of “hell if I know” (exact quote)? There is a docs section on the webpage, but try using the information there in practice – good luck.

    One might wonder why there’s a background object as a first class citizen anyway? As with all things EFL, it’s a hack for creating backgrounds, which sometimes work. If it doesn’t work, there’s another first class citizen – a rectangle object which you can add to your view. Yup – there’s a hack for a hack.

    But let’s go into some details. Remember the quote about types? EFL takes that philosophy seriously. Everything is a pointer to something called Evas_Object, which translates to void *. Those knowledgeable in the horrible language of C know it’s a pointer to anything. And so it is. Everything you create is an Evas_Object and every function takes an Evas_Object as the subject to work on. But why throw away type safety? Because fuck you, that’s why! If you wonder how to know which functions can be called on a given Evas_Object, the answer is simple – you don’t. It’s all about experimenting, hacking and debugging. Calling an invalid function on an object can result in:

    • Nothing, leaving you wondering WTF.
    • An extremely helpful console message: “SPANK! SPANK! SPANK! Naughty programmer!”. Really, I’m not joking about that one.
    • Another extremely helpful message: “You bitch!”. And I’m not joking about that one either – it was discovered by a female coworker while trying to hack layouts to work. Perfect timing on EFL side here.
    • A crash, if you’re lucky, so you can debug the issue.

    Things get much worse when something less trivial is needed. For example, to create two buttons next to each other you need (in addition to the steps above):

    1. Create a widget of type box with the background as a parent (obviously!), which is not really a widget but a layout, but it’s also not a layout because a layout in EFL is something totally different and it’s not a widget. As usual – it’s a hack for positioning widgets next to each other.
    2. Show the box.
    3. Create an Evas_Object of type button with the box as its parent.
    4. Show the button.
    5. Create a next Evas_Object of type button with the box as its parent.
    6. Show the button.
    7. Marvel at your two buttons which took you 50-100 lines of code to create.

    So you have a button and you would like to react to a click. There’s where ironically named smart callbacks come into play. You can register a callback for an event for your Evas_Object. Event type is passed to the register function as a string. Is there a list of event names? Nope. Search through examples and pseudo-docs and you might find some that work. So what happens if you guess wrong or make a typo? Nothing, of course. No easy debugging for you, mister!

    Ok, but you finally have your event name and a smart callback of type:

    typedef void(* Evas_Smart_Cb)(void *data, Evas_Object *obj, void *event_info);
    

    Let’s look at the parameters. Data? It’s the const void * you pass as an additional parameter to the register function. But wait! If you can pass a const, you can pass a string literal for example, which will then be de-const’d, so you can modify it at will. Welcome to the land of undefined behavior by design!

    Ok, let’s move on. obj is you Evas_Object, that is anything you can imagine. Is it a button? Is it a text label? Is it a wooden table? If your callback is meant to be generic, have fun figuring that out. It usually is the object you registered your callback with. Usually. You can register a click callback on a button and obj will be the button. You can register a click callback on a list widget item and obj will not be the item.

    And what’s with that cryptic event_info? Also – could be anything. It’s some info for some events, I guess. Unless it’s not and it’s just an aptly named list widget item in disguise. Or something else. Did I mention EFL doesn’t like types?

    Another interesting design related to callbacks is key handling. You can register your callback for keydown events and get all the info in a neat structure named Evas_Event_Key_Down. What would you expect from such structure? Maybe a key code? Ha! EFL gives you something more – a key name. Instead of comparing integer code to some universal key number, you are forced to do a string comparison against system-dependent key name. To find if your key was A, compare the name to string “A”; to check for return key, compare to “[Return]”; to check for play button, compare to “XF86AudioPlay” and pray your application will never be ported to something else than a Linux with X.org. In short – you want to react to 20 key presses, make 20 string comparisons against names which are listed somewhere in you OS/window system documentation.

    But that’s not all you get in that neat event structure. You also get a string representation of “A UTF8 string if this keystroke has produced a visible string to be ADDED.” So far so good. Wait a minute, there’s another field which gives “The logical key : (eg shift+1 == exclamation)”. So which one I should use to display the textual representation? As usual – play around, experiment and hope your solution works (it won’t). You also get a field named “data” which is some kind of data, I suppose. Nobody really knows, especially the docs.

    An interesting topic is layouts. A layout (except for box layout which is actually a widget for some reason) is a definition of a collection of GUI elements written in some forsaken language. You create those files, put widget definitions inside them, compile with custom compiler (edje_cc) and use the resulting file. This leads to some problems, unknown to the sane world. For example, a layout is immutable. You make it, you stick with it. That immutability is pretty far reaching. If you place an image in a layout, you not only cannot move the image widget anywhere, but you also cannot do anything with the image data itself. The author recognized this can be a problem, especially when all competing libraries offer dynamic modification of widget layouts. An obvious solution would be making layouts dynamic, but it’s not the EFL way. Instead you can add a pseudo-element to the layout called SWALLOW (given the previous error messages, I suspect the author designed EFL while watching Redtube). This SWALLOW can them be substituted by a real widget. Therefore, if you want your layout to be truly dynamic, make a bunch of SWALLOWs in the layout which makes it extremely readable. The compiler is also worthy of noting. It always returns exit code 0, even when it fails. Have fun designing a build system with EFL in mind. This is especially entertaining when you have a previously compiled version of a layout – it gets silently used and you’re left with hours of debugging why is nothing changing on screen.

    In typical lovecraftian C fashion, EFL disregards any notion of memory ownership. It frees some data you pour into it, and it doesn’t free other. Which is which? You’ll only know when your process crashes on double free. Or when your memory fills up. Or never.

    One example of this memory mismanagement is a thing called a Genlist. It in essence is a list widget with some items. It has a special “feature” – it deletes items when they go out of view and allocates memory for them when they get into view. Make a quick swipe on such list on your mobile device and you can actually hear your RAM scream in agony.

    There could be quite a few tomes written about the abhorrent malefaction that is EFL, but let me keep this post short. Or at least shorter than planned. Let me talk about the next version of EFL, which my corporation doesn’t use yet. This version might be publicly available or not. Hopefully not, because all developers died, but I don’t think mankind is that lucky. A little background:

    Our beloved EFL main developer, whose name I dare not say or I go on a rampage, complained he had tons of bug reports about crashes etc. Something about passing wrong Evas_Objects to wrong functions. He decided to tackle the problem in the next version. I’ll let you guess which solution he choose:

    1. Incorporate type safety.
    2. Give some meaningful names for all typedefs, if type safety is too hard, so people would at least see what goes where.
    3. Don’t use pointers as pointers. Split the bits in them into 3 (or 4) groups, which would be cast to a numerical indexes into 3- (or 4-) dimensional hash map, which in turn results in a real pointer to function + object, and call it, if such exist. If not, don’t do anything and don’t give the programmer any feedback. Oh, and implement this in a way that makes the absolute maximum objects your process can have equal to 512. But don’t forget to not warn anyone when the limit gets exceed, but call given function on a random object which causes hash collision.

    Small hint: it’s not 1 or 2. Welcome to the 21st century programming!

    Some of you may know a Qt presentation, where someone built a fully functional media player with theme support in QML in real-time in front of an audience. Doing the same in EFL is measured in man-years. I’m pretty serious about that one. Small projects like these require teams of 5-10 programmers working up to a year.

    And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    I'm exhausted just from reading that.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I'm exhausted just from reading that.

    I made it about 1/2 way, then started skimming...


  • ♿ (Parody)

    Enlightenment...were these the guys who were all excited about making flames on the desktop or something? Or is that something completely different?


  • BINNED

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?

    Well... fuck. There goes that OS as well.

    Fucking hell, just use Qt then! Yes, I'm slightly biased towards it, I admit, but given that this

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    someone built a fully functional media player with theme support in QML in real-time in front of an audience

    is true (haven't seen it myself, but I know what QML can do and I believe it can be done), and it compiles and runs on fucking everything, why the hell wouldn't you?



  • This is definitely front page material.


  • BINNED

    @boomzilla said:

    Enlightenment...were these the guys who were all excited about making flames on the desktop or something? Or is that something completely different?

    Well, I tried E17 a while ago. Names match (Evas rings familiar), so I'm gonna say yes.


  • area_pol

    I can actually write a whole book of the WTFs I encountered there, but I doubt anyone would dare to read it. In fact, I doubt anyone would make it through alive.



  • http://img.pandawhale.com/47677-storm-troopers-didnt-read-LOL-QvkW.gif

    @dcon said:

    I made it about 1/2 way, then started skimming...

    Same here.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    10/10, wonderful rant, would read again



  • If you're interested in working with, or on, the EFL take a look at the [url=http://trac.enlightenment.org/e/wiki]wiki[/url] for more information.
    Um … OK, let’s check that out …


  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    And did I mention EFL is the basis of all applications on Tizen?

    © 2012 Tizen Project, a Linux Foundation Project.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @boomzilla said:

    Enlightenment...were these the guys who were all excited about making flames on the desktop or something? Or is that something completely different?

    Enlightenment's a Linux window manager, unless this is something different.

    I used it back in the day, maybe 10-15 years ago, and thought it was pretty neat. This is an excellent story about a truly horrible WTF.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    Well... fuck. There goes [Tizen] as well.

    Yeah, I was thinking that, too.



  • Who's Eva? What's the significance of the Evas_ prefix (rather than, say EFL_Object)?

    Also, wow, I hope I never have to so much as look at the documentation for this abomination, let alone source code, let alone develop on it... :wtf:


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @FrostCat said:

    Enlightenment's a Linux window manager, unless this is something different.

    No, looks like it's the same thing. Well, the OP is talking about underlying libraries:

    Points to:

    That page talks about Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.


  • area_pol

    @tar said:

    Who's Eva? What's the significance of the Evas_ prefix (rather than, say EFL_Object)?

    I'm pretty sure nobody really knows, but if you follow a trail of crashes and memory corruption, you could eventually find out.


  • FoxDev

    @tar said:

    Who's Eva?

    She was the biker girl from MGS3: Snake Eater, wasn't she?



  • Thank you for ruining my Friday. This morning I woke up all bright and cheery, filled with hope for humankind. After reading about this Endarkening monstrosity I have lost all faith in my fellow H. sapiens.

    Maybe I should take up drinking or something harder to take the edge off my existential despair.


  • BINNED


  • area_pol

    @Onyx said:

    Fucking hell, just use Qt then! Yes, I'm slightly biased towards it, I admit, but given that this

    someone built a fully functional media player with theme support in QML in real-time in front of an audience

    is true (haven't seen it myself, but I know what QML can do and I believe it can be done), and it compiles and runs on fucking everything, why the hell wouldn't you?

    All I can say about choosing EFL is it involved a comparison of application startup time (with differences measured in milliseconds) and a comparison of memory usage between EFL and Unity3D game engine. And no, don't ask.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    And no, don't ask.

    I need to know.


  • BINNED

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    comparison of memory usage between EFL and Unity3D game engine

    :wtf:

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    And no, don't ask.

    I don't think the remains of my sanity could take it anyway.


  • FoxDev

    @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    All I can say about choosing EFL is it involved a comparison of application startup time (with differences measured in milliseconds) and a comparison of memory usage between EFL and Unity3D game engine. And no, don't ask.

    @aliceif said:
    I need to know.

    Isn't it obvious? The people in charge of making that decision are fuckwits.



  • @NeighborhoodButcher said:

    All I can say about choosing EFL is it involved a comparison of application startup time (with differences measured in milliseconds) and a comparison of memory usage between EFL and Unity3D game engine. And no, don't ask.

    WTF sort of app is this?


  • area_pol

    I wonder if it's possible to make it.



  • @dcon said:

    I made it about 1/2 way, then started skimming...

    I realized it filled my screen, checked the length, and said "nope".


  • area_pol

    By doing this, you actually saved your sanity.



  • @abarker said:

    I realized it filled my screen, checked the length, and said "nope".

    But you took the time to scroll through the comments to find someone else who didn't read the OP, just so you could say you didn't read the OP? Umm... ok...



  • I remember trying the Enlightenment WM back in the day when I was playing around with Linux distros for an old Pentium II. It sucked ass and I ended up putting Xfce on it.


  • area_pol

    Some things just never change.



  • I'm surprised.
    That sounds even worse than the proprietary windows/widgets library in the company I work in.



  • I bet it's a lot easier to boot up a windowed application where the windows can't be resized or rearranged in real-time.


  • area_pol

    In reality, it's even worse than it sounds.



  • I read every word. It was worth the time. +100.



  • @NedFodder said:

    But you took the time to scroll through the comments to find someone else who didn't read the OP, just so you could say you didn't read the OP? Umm... ok...

    It was the second comment. After finding the end of the OP, it was on my screen.


  • area_pol

    Out of some perversive curiosity, I clicked around on their wiki:

    Yup, sounds about right.



  • And this thing is called "Enlightened"?

    Must be some kind of Brave New World reference I'm not getting.



  • @Onyx said:

    Well... fuck. There goes that OS as well.

    I know one of the devs working on Tizen. He was quite enthusiastic about it (met him last two years ago, though) - I think I'll ask him how much actual contamination influence EFL had on Tizen.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Enlightenment...were these the guys who were all excited about making flames on the desktop or something? Or is that something completely different?

    I think those responsible for this catastrophe were lighting up something.



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    I think those responsible for this catastrophe were lighting up something.

    http://i.imgur.com/C5zmDyO.gif


  • BINNED

    Hey! Who recorded me cooking?



  • Oh man they have an IDE for their shit. Alas you have to log in to download it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Oh man they have an IDE for their shit. Alas you have to log in to download it.

    I wonder if they used their own library to create the IDE?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @abarker said:

    I realized it filled my screen, checked the length, and said "nope".

    But, can it be hatted? I dare say it may be rather hard...



  • @CHUDbert said:

    I dare say it may be rather hard...

    That's what she said.



  • Here's the very first sentence describing this shitheap from their own wiki:

    EFL is a collection of libraries that are independent or may build on top of each-other to provide useful features that complement an OS's existing environment, rather than wrap and abstract it, trying to be their own environment and OS in its entirety.

    It looks like the documentation is just as gibberish as the rest of it.


  • Java Dev

    Name makes me think of this.

    The first thing Tak did, he wrote himself.
    The second thing Tak did, he wrote the Laws.
    The third thing Tak did, he wrote the World.
    The fourth thing Tak did, he wrote a cave.
    The fifth thing Tak did, he wrote a geode, an egg of stone.

    And in the twilight of the mouth of the cave, the geode hatched and the Brothers were born.
    The first Brother walked towards the light, and stood under the open sky. Thus he became too tall. He was the first Man. He found no laws, and he was enlightened.
    The second Brother walked towards the darkness, and stood under a roof of stone. Thus he achieved the correct height. He was the first Dwarf. He found the Laws Tak had written, and he was endarkened.
    But some of the living spirit of Tak was trapped in the broken stone egg, and it became the first troll, wandering the world unbidden and unwanted, without soul or purpose, learning or understanding. Fearful of light and darkness it shambles for ever in twilight, knowing nothing, learning nothing, creating nothing, being nothing.

    Particularly the human/dwarf bit, of course.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    >EFL is a collection of libraries that are independent or may build on top of each-other

    So they're either independent or interdependent, but the documentation writers are not quite sure which?

    @blakeyrat said:

    >provide usefulless features

    @blakeyrat said:

    complement an OS's existing environment, rather than wrap and abstract it, trying to be their own environment and OS in its entirety

    The third clause does not seem to go with either the first or second clauses.


  • BINNED

    I'd love to see a kernel that has no type safety whatsoever though. Hilarity would be sure to ensue.


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