Cairo Graphics Library Drops OpenGL Support After A Decade Of Inactivity

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.

So as of yesterday all the Cairo OpenGL code has been cleared out, lightening this graphics library by 14k lines in the process.