Cairo Graphics - Open Source 2D Rendering

As part of my iPhone development I've been looking around at C and C++ libraries. Though the iPhone has extensive graphics capability e.g. through Quartz and Open GL ES, the fact that you can link C and C++ in is very handy. One such library is Cairo Graphics which is free software. As always you need to read the licenses before using them in your applications.

Cairo is a cross system 2D renderer written in C designed to be used by many different programming languages. Think of it as a bit like Windows GDI+. It has pretty good documentation with samples, API reference, a cookbook and a tutorial. If you've done graphics the old fashioned windows way, eg select display context, select fonts etc, you'll feel right at home! Of course you've probably used at least one application that uses Cairo; namely the Gecko layout engine that powers Firefox 3.0.

• Link to C Code Library