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 lets you have functions called when file descriptors become active for reading or writing, allowing for streamlined, non-blocking IO. Ecore may provide (if enabled) the following libraries: * ecore: main loop, signals, and base; * ecore_con: http/ftp (curl) access; * ecore_file: easy file manipulation (copy, move, symlink, remove), monitoring and directory (mkdir, mkdir -p, rm -fr); * ecore_txt: text charset conversion (iconv wrapper); * ecore_evas: integrates <pkg>media-libs/evas</pkg> into different input and output systems, providing easy to use canvas; * ecore_x, ecore_sdl, ecore_quartz, ecore_directfb, ecore_win32, ecore_wince, ecore_fb: access to different input/output systems, mapping them to ecore main loop and events; * ecore_imf, ecore_imf_evas: input-method framework used to integrate with different input methods such as virtual keyboards; * ecore_input, ecore_input_evas: abstraction of input events.

10:19 on May 28, 2012