Pixman 0.38 Released With Meson Build System Support

Pixman 0.38 is out this morning to kick off a new week of open-source software releases. Pixman is the pixel manipulation library used by the X.Org Server, Cairo, and other Linux software projects.

The Pixman 0.38 release isn't the most exciting update and in fact only a handful of changes over Pixman 0.36 from last November, which itself was the first update to this library in three years. Pixman doesn't see too much activity these days thanks in part to more software using Vulkan and OpenGL to benefit from GPU hardware acceleration. The two primary changes of Pixman 0.38.0 is introducing Meson build system support and implementing floating point gradient computation.

For the 0.38 release, the Autotools build system support is still around but if Pixman follows the trend of other FreeDesktop.org projects, in the next release or two that support is likely to be dropped thanks to unifying around Meson.

Details on the floating point gradient computation changes via this commit as well as a change for using maximum precision in the computations.

More details on Pixman 0.38 via the Pixman project repository.