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Cairo 2D Graphics May Become Part of ISO C++

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-than-just-a-city-in-egypt dept.

An anonymous reader sends this news from Phoronix: "The C++ standards committee is looking at adopting a Cairo C++ interface as part of a future revision to the ISO C++ standard to provide 2D drawing. Herb Sutter, the chair of the ISO C++ standards committee, sent out a message to the Cairo developers this week about their pursuit to potentially standardize a basic 2D drawing library for ISO C++. The committee right now is looking at using a C++-ified version of Cairo. Sutter wrote, 'we are currently investigating the direction of proposing a mechanically C++-ified version of Cairo. Specifically, "mechanically C++-ified" means taking Cairo as-is and transforming it with a one-page list of mechanical changes such as turning _create functions into constructors, (mystruct*, int length) function parameters to vector<struct>& parameters, that sort of thing — the design and abstractions and functions are unchanged.'"

2 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. Re:huh? by JDG1980 · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is redundant. High level concepts like drawing graphics are always going to be system dependent, and today's operating systems come with them already. I don't see why having this as part of the C++ base library benefits..

    Blitting to the screen may be OS-dependent, but rendering to a canvas need not be.

  2. Re:But... why? by maztuhblastah · · Score: 4, Informative

    Unless things have changed I never paid Qt any attention because it is dually licensed and therefore not truly free software and its ownership keeps changing between commercial companies.
    Last I checked Qt is "free" for open source projects but requires an expensive commercial license for anything else.

    You last checked about a decade ago, then.

    Here's how it works now (and has worked for a while now): Qt is Free. Not "free", but Free. It's under the LGPL. And the GPL.

    "But it's owned by a commercial company, and they can just close off the source."

    Nope. Still stays open. Back a few years ago, the KDE group got a special concession from Nokia. They set up the KDE Free Qt Foundation; if the commercial owners of Qt (Digia) stop releasing Qt under the LGPL and GPL3, KDE has the right to make the whole thing BSD. Irrevocably. And the agreement stays, even if Digia is sold, bought, etc. Read the link if you'd like to know more.

    Basically, Qt is Free. If the owners ever stop releasing it for Free, KDE gets to release it under an even more Free license.

    Qt has been Free for a while. Qt is still Free. It will remain Free

    --
    The real litigious bastards...