Cairo 1.17.8 was released this week as a new development snapshot of this 2D vector graphics library which over the years has been widely used by a host of desktop software.
The development of Cairo has been rather stagnant in recent years, with the stable version of Cairo 1.16 being introduced at the end of 2018, but recently new work has been done in this open source library. This week saw the Cairo 1.17.8 development snapshot tagged by Emmanuele Bassi with him remarking, “A new snapshot of Cairo! And it only took less than a year this time!“
Cairo 1.17.8 snapshot features a variety of bug fixes, improved macOS and Windows support, COLRv1 font rendering support, removal of the Autotools build system in favor of an exclusive focus on Meson, and more. Improvements in macOS and Microsoft Windows support involve numerous bug fixes and build changes.
This release also removes OpenGL/GLES support from Cairo after that back-end was not maintained for about a decade.
Excitingly, this snapshot of Cairo 1.17.8 is probably their end goal on releasing new features before delivering Cairo 1.18 with fixes up to v1.18.0 markup.
