Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME’s GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo.
Cairo is something most end users don’t really have to think about or worry too much about, but it’s a crucial part of the open source operating system world. The most interesting change in 1.18 is that it drops support for a variety of old back-ends, most notably Qt 4, BeOS, and OS/2.