3 ms·

What is the motivation behind including Cairo?

• zanny 12y ago
  Herb wants new users to be able to draw graphics without using third party toolkits. It is not meant to be all encompassing, but if you need custom 2d it is a nice feature, albeit very out of scope of a standard library implementation.
  • pjmlp 12y ago
    It is pretty much in scope. We old timers remember the days when compilers came with graphics libraries. So why forcing everyone to jump through hurdles just to do some simple uses of 2D programming?
    • zanny 12y ago
      Because, I guess, Swing. Unless the standard compels implementations to use platform native windowing systems and theming engines (since you can't really leave it out if you want visual output) then its going to be an ugly mess. And, for example, a huge amount of Qt is just native theming on all its supported platforms.
      • pjmlp 12y ago
        The point is not replace WxWidgets, Qt or flavor of the month GUI framework. Plain simple 2D graphics like BGI, to allow any C++ beginner not to worry which bazillion libraries s/he needs to download to draw some colored squares.