Monday, March 18, 2013

Simple QML vs EFL comparison


Recently I found this blog post about complete minesweeper clone - elemines - based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. As EFL are designed to efficiently work even on PDAs, I came up with an idea to implement similar clone in plain QML/Javascript (QmlMiner) and perform simple comparative analysis. I wondered how the QML version would compare with the EFL one.
Following areas were analyzed:
  1. Developer experience
  2. Source code size and used languages
  3. Memory consumption
  4. Startup time
The comparison was concluded with a limited performance check.
You can look at it from many angles. Just note that I was comparing virtual-machine-based  runtime (Qt4/QML - QtQuick 1.1, JavaScript) with EFL app that is coded in C and compiled into a native binary to see how much advantage the low-level C programming has over more modern technology such as QML.