Evas is a canvas display library. It is markedly different from most display and windowing systems as the canvas is structural and is also a state engine, whereas most display and windowing systems are immediate mode display targets. Evas handles the logic between a structural display via its state engine, and controls the target windowing system in order to produce rendered results of the current canvas' state on the display.

Immediate mode display systems retain very little or no state. A program executes a series of commands, as in the following pseudo code.

draw line from position (0, 0) to position (100, 200);
 
draw rectangle from position (10, 30) to position (50, 500);
 
bitmap_handle = create_bitmap();
scale bitmap_handle to size 100 x 100;
draw image bitmap_handle at position (10, 30);

The series of commands is executed by the windowing system and the results are typically displayed on the screen. Once the commands are executed, the display system does not know how to reproduce this image again, and has to be instructed by the application on how to redraw sections of the screen if needed. Each successive command is executed as instructed by the application and either emulated by software or sent to the graphics hardware on the device to be performed.

The advantage of such a system is that it is simple and gives a program tight control over how something looks and is drawn. Given the increasing complexity of displays and demands by users to have better looking interfaces, more work needs to be done at this level by the internals of widget sets, custom display widgets and other programs. This means that more logic and display rendering code needs to be written again each time the application needs to figure out how to minimize redraws so that display is fast and interactive, and keep track of redraw logic.

For example, if in the scene below, the windowing system requires the application to redraw the area from 0, 0 to 50, 50 (also referred to as the “expose event”). Then the programmer calculates manually the updates and repaints it again.

Redraw from position (0, 0) to position (50, 50):
 
// What was in area (0, 0, 50, 50)?
 
// 1. intersection part of line (0, 0) to (100, 200)?
   draw line from position (0, 0) to position (25, 50);
 
// 2. intersection part of rectangle (10, 30) to (50, 500)?
   draw rectangle from position (10, 30) to position (50, 50)
 
// 3. intersection part of image at (10, 30), size 100 x 100?
   bitmap_subimage = subregion from position (0, 0) to position (40, 20)
   draw image bitmap_subimage at position (10, 30);

If all elements in the above scene are opaque, the system is doing useless paints: part of the line is behind the rectangle, and part of the rectangle is behind the image. These useless paints tend to be very costly.

Evas is a structural system in which the programmer creates and manages display objects and their properties, and as a result of this higher level state management, the canvas is able to redraw the set of objects when needed to represent the current state of the canvas.

For example, see the following pseudo code.

line_handle = create_line();
set line_handle from position (0, 0) to position (100, 200);
show line_handle;
 
rectangle_handle = create_rectangle();
move rectangle_handle to position (10, 30);
resize rectangle_handle to size 40 x 470;
show rectangle_handle;
 
bitmap_handle = create_bitmap();
scale bitmap_handle to size 100 x 100;
move bitmap_handle to position (10, 30);
show bitmap_handle;
 
render scene;

This looks longer, but when the display needs to be refreshed or updated, the programmer only moves, resizes, shows, hides etc. the objects that need to change. The programmer thinks at the object logic level, and the canvas software does the rest of the work, figuring out what changed in the canvas since it was last drawn, how to most efficiently redraw the canvas and its contents to reflect the current state, and doing the actual drawing of the canvas.

This allows the programmer think in a more natural way when dealing with a display, and saves time and effort of working out how to load and display images, to render given the current display system etc. Since Evas is portable across different display systems, this gives the programmer the ability to port and display the code on different display systems with little work.

Evas is a display system somewhere between a widget set and an immediate mode display system. It retains basic display logic, but does little high-level logic such as scrollbars, sliders, push buttons etc.

For more information on the UI rendering modes (immediate and retained), see UI Rendering Mode.