Resource Usage

There are many reasons, but a few are that moksha and Enlightenment are modular, so only what is used is loaded. Also as a departure from the unix way it relies on binaries. The author of Enlightenment, on which moksha is based, Rasta puts it like this:

“ it doesn't break things up into lots of tiny processes with pipes
and what not gluing them together. it takes a monolithic approach - modules for
expansion (like the linux kernel) and a very integrated single process (as much
as it can manage) approach. this leads to e's memory footprint being tiny
compared to all the desktops of equivalent functionality, and e's startup being
pretty much at the top level (fast) given how much it does etc”

Others will be able to explain better, but that’s my (very basic) understanding.

Edit - and as enigma said below, wallpapers and themes are compiled into edj files which are binary, and are therefore a lot faster than Json or xml, and other traditional compression formats like tar or gzip for reasons I will never fully understand.

phab.enlightenment.org/phame/post/view/12/eet_compared_with_json_-_eet_comes_out_on_top/

Also on resources. Enlightenment or Moksha (E17 fork) is written in pure C. Moksha is just an application based on EFL library which is also written in C. C is very effective low level language which provides ultra speed and light mem management. It lacks some higher langs features like garbage collectors (it is possible to use in some cases). It means the memory management is partly in coders hands. If coder is smart, the code is effective, light and fast.

See more here

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_science)

Stefan