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Intel has sponsored development of Clutter for MeeGo. List of features from that site:

        * Scene-graph of layered 2D interface elements manipulated in 3D space via position, grouping, transparency, scaling, clipping and rotation.
        * Animation framework, providing path interpolation, transitions and other custom effects via implicit animations.
        * User Interface definition format, based on JSON, for describing layout and animation.
        * Advanced input event handling, including multiple pointing devices.
        * Custom Pango renderer providing efficient internationalised UTF8 text rendering through OpenGL.
        * Support for high end OpenGL features such as Shaders, FBO, VBO and PBO through a low-level, object oriented abstraction API.
        * Support for media playback with GStreamer, Cairo graphics rendering, GTK+ embedding, Box2D physics engine, etc.
        * Object oriented design via GObject with a familiar GTK+ like API.
        * Runs on Linux, Windows and OSX with native backend window system support for GLX, EGL (both on X11 and framebuffer surfaces), WGL and Cocoa.
        * Support for mobile devices with fixed point internals and portability across Open GL, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0
        * Developed in C, with language bindings for Perl, Python, C#, C++, Vala and Ruby.

Try this page.

After struggling through the site, it looks like a big mess that solves no useful problem. I can't find any screenshots, either. Here's the slide show from a conference. But it has exactly one graphic, and that's part of a discussion of how you can use arbitrary functions, like "sine", on the alpha channel. (Using "sine" on the alpha channel is basically the <BLINK> tag revisited.)

Worse, this is a toolkit for C applications. It's not for web use. It's not 3D enough for game development, and it's too much for business applications. Layout has to be done at the programmer level; there aren't GUI tools for layout. (Some games use Flash for 2D GUI elements, not because they run the Adobe/Macromedia Flash run-time engine, but because the tools for developing Flash are available and usable by artists.)

There's nothing inherently wrong with running a 2D GUI through OpenGL; we were doing that in 1997. Softimage|3D worked that way. But it's kind of dated.

Meanwhile we've got Python and Ruby applications they don't have to compromise for powerful GUIs and they're available everywhere.

.Net isn't what new Linux development should use. It should only be used for compatibility, like Wine.

I know them only from a much bigger thing: Clutter.

What do you mean compiz like effects and how would a generic lib help you integrate with your toolkit widgets/canvas? Have you ever taken a look at clutter?