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EC language
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 12:40 pm
by milan1612
As I was recently browsing the web to find an additional programming language
besides PureBasic, I found a very interesting language called EC.
It is derived from (and even compatible with) C and has a platform independant
runtime library (Windows + Unix) featuring almost everything you need.
It compiles (in fact it translates to C) natively and therefore provides almost the
same speed than C.
It is free (I didn't find a licence yet, but you can download the whole package for free)
and the company behind it provides an IDE with integrated designer + compiler + debugger
Find out more at
http://www.ecere.com/technologies.html
What do you think, does it worth to take a deeper look?
EDIT: Ahh, I forgot to say it has full OOP support

EDIT2: Found the licence - Free for noncommercial use (
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ecere/)...
EDIT3: ...and commercial use, too

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 1:09 pm
by Brice Manuel
Wow, that does look nice, doesn't it?
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 1:36 pm
by srod
Looks awesome.
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 1:49 pm
by #NULL
yes, thanks for the link
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 4:36 pm
by dell_jockey
thanks for the link, I'm downloading now...
License is actually Free for all uses
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 5:06 pm
by jerstlouis
Hey guys, I was wondering why so many people were coming from purebasic.fr, and was happy to find this post
I fixed the License in freshmeat, it's actually free for commercial uses as well.
I am considering open sourcing it under a BSD license as well, if it may help the adoption of eC and the SDK. What do you guys think?
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 5:14 pm
by milan1612
Sounds great, I'm currently testing EC. The only thing I don't like is that you
don't use WinAPI for the GUI library. Your custom one seems to be quite slow
and doesn't use the systems style.
Nevertheless I must admit the syntax is great. It's very intuitive...
Re: License is actually Free for all uses
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 5:19 pm
by Brice Manuel
jerstlouis wrote:I fixed the License in freshmeat, it's actually free for commercial uses as well.
Very nice!
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 5:23 pm
by jerstlouis
On all platforms the SDK has its own GUI library...
(You would be free to use eC to use another GUI library...)
The GUI library manages its windows by itself, for a better control of messages and knowledge of windows layout... But it is rarely said to be slow, and myself find it extremely responsive... One thing is that it is always fully double-buffered, which means that Ecere applications never flicker, and you do not need to do any special work to do so.
There are various display modes support as well, such as Direct3D, OpenGL, DirectDraw, GDI, etc. and it is easily expandable so it could be tweaked to your own likings. Also custom skin can be developed which makes it look exactly the way you like...
It makes it more uniform to have its own GUI elements and ensures the exact same behavior across all platforms.
By the way if you guys are on IRC, you can join us in #ecere on irc.freenode.net .
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 8:42 pm
by Brice Manuel
One thing is that it is always fully double-buffered, which means that Ecere applications never flicker,
I would take the flicker over the bouncing. Anytime I move the mouse down to the bottom of the screen and the taskbar pops up any Ecere program moves up the screen, and then moves back down when the taskbar auto-hides. If this can't be disabled, that would be a show-stopper for me, but otherwise I am extremely impressed with the product.
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 9:24 pm
by bembulak
Hi,
sounds great. Runs on both of the platforms I'm using, has a good license,
supports OOP, can do GUI and GFX... looks good!
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 11:24 pm
by jerstlouis
About the auto-hide thing, yes that's a bit annoying...
This has nothing to do with the double-buffering / flicker though,
and could certainly be worked around / disabled...
It basically adjusts to your desktop area which Windows changes when the task bar auto hides.
Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 12:19 am
by Rook Zimbabwe
This looks great... I cannot wait to test it out and see what I can make it crash (i mean do! )

Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 8:52 am
by mskuma
[removed]
Posted: Sun Oct 28, 2007 9:44 am
by PB
> The only thing I don't like is that you don't use WinAPI for the GUI library.
and
> I could not get the text labels for buttons etc to accept any non-English text.
> the IDE reported an error but not the line number the error occurred on.
> the help/docs are separate from the IDE, ideally should be integrated.
Come on guys, this section isn't tech support / bug reports for another language.
Show some respect for Fred and take discussion of the language to its own site.