Cairo Graphics Library Drops OpenGL Support After A Decade Of Inactivity

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 29 January 2023 at 09:00 AM EST. 54 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
The Cairo graphics library that provides a vector graphics based API and in turn having a number of different back-ends for software/hardware acceleration, which in turn is used by a variety of different desktop applications, has removed its OpenGL support.

The Cairo graphics library over the years has seen use by GNOME's GTK toolkit, Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and dozens of other software projects. This vector graphics library in turn allows targeting a number of different back-ends from X11 to Apple Quartz, Microsoft Win32, and file formats like PDF, SVG, and PostScript. Cairo has also supported targeting OpenGL directly, but as of this week the code has now been removed.

For the past year there has been a "drop cairo-gl" merge request to get rid of the OpenGL code given its "prototype" status and not much activity to it in the past decade. Plus it was not adapted to make use of the OpenGL GLVND and other modern OpenGL features.

Cairo drops OpenGL support


So as of yesterday all the Cairo OpenGL code has been cleared out, lightening this graphics library by 14k lines in the process.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week