Cairo Graphics Library Drops Many Old Backends

The Cairo graphics library that is used by GNOME/GTK, Mozilla Gecko, and many other projects for vector-based 2D graphics drawing has decided to remove a number of its old drawing back-ends.

This past week Cairo gutted out its old back-ends for Qt (limited to Qt4), Cogl that is no longer maintained, OpenVG, BeOS as it doesn't support the Meson build system, OS/2 as it also doesn't support Meson and might not be in a working state since 2006 (last tested), DirectFB as it's been dead (though DirectFB2 was recently started), and the DRM back-end that was an experiment and broken now for at least a decade.

Emmanuele Bassi commented with the removal, "This is a lot of code that exists only as a trap for unwary travelers, or a maintenance sink. Removing the Qt and BeOS backends alone allows us to drop the dependency on a C++ compiler in our build systems, as well as removing the complexity of dealing with one."

There have also been other improvements merged to Cairo this past week besides the removing of decade old code rot.