Cairo 1.17.8 Released - OpenGL/GLES Drawing Removed, Better macOS & Windows Support

Cairo 1.17.8 was released this week as a new development snapshot of this 2D vector graphics library that over the years has seen widespread use by a multitude of desktop software.

Cairo development has rather stagnated in recent years with the Cairo 1.16 stable release having been introduced in late 2018, but recently there has been some fresh work going into this open-source library. This week saw the Cairo 1.17.8 development snapshot tagged by Emmanuele Bassi with him remarking, "A new cairo snapshot! And it only took less than one year, this time!"

The Cairo 1.17.8 snapshot has a variety of bug fixes, improved macOS and Windows support, support for rendering COLRv1 fonts, removal of the Autotools build system in favor of focusing exclusively on Meson, and more. The macOS and Microsoft Windows support improvements involve lots of bug fixes and build changes.

This release also drops Cairo's OpenGL/GLES support after that back-end went unmaintained for about a decade.

Excitingly this Cairo 1.17.8 snapshot is likely their final focus on landing new feature work before they ship Cairo 1.18 with whatever fixes come about until tagging v1.18.0.