Cairo is an open source graphics library that provides software developers with a vector graphics-based, device-independent API. Cairo supports output to a number of different backends, including X11, Apple Quartz, Win32, and file formats such as PNG, PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG.

Cairo is designed to produce consistent output across all output media, while taking advantage of hardware acceleration.

Cairo is very popular in the open source community because of its cross-platform support. These include Firefox, WebKit, Mono, the vector graphics application Inkscape, and even Sony’s PlayStation are using Cairo, and since GTK 3 all rendering is done using Cairo.

Although Cairo also supported OpenGL experimentally, but now the relevant code has been completely deleted, and Cairo no longer supports OpenGL.

Almost a year ago, a Cairo repository called Drop cairo-gl(abandoning Cairo-gl) merge request, the description of the merge request is written:

Cairo’s GL support has been a prototype, and nothing has happened in the past 10 years to make it work as expected.

It is for this reason that Cairo finally gave up its support for OpenGL. At present, all Cairo OpenGL codes have been deleted. As you can see from the figure below, a total of 14014 lines of code have been deleted this time.

OpenGL has also become another “on the list” project since abandoning the BeOS, OS/2 and DirectFB backends in 2022.