[cairo] Questions about Cairo and Windows

[Thorgrimsson, Chris]

I've been using cairo and Pango on Windows XP (via a set of VisualWorks Smalltalk bindings) for over a year and have been very happy with it. I work for a company that makes semiconductor processing equipment and we use cairo to drive an animation overview for one of the machines. It's been in production for over a year without issue. Granted, we use a fraction of what cairo is capable of doing, but what we do use works very well. So far, every performance issue I have run into, has been on my side, not cairo.

When it came to building the DLLs, I started to try and do it all in VS2008, but ended up going the route of GCC+mingw32. I think an end-to-end build within VS is possible, I just didn't have the patience to figure it all out. That was all when cairo was at 1.8.8. We are still using 1.8.8. Shortly after I finished mucking around with the whole build process, Travis Griggs (the same guy who made the Smalltalk language bindings) published an easier end-to-end build guide on the cairo wiki for building on Windows and Mac. You may have already seen this, but just in case, check out. http://cairographics.org/building/ . Over the next several weeks, I will be attempting to rebuild for 1.8.10, but will probably end up using the method that Travis published. If you do end up choosing to do it all in VS2010, I would be overjoyed to know how you did it!

Curious...is Windows7 the only target OS? If so, why not Direct2D (dare I mention that name on this forum....).

-Chris



From: cairo-bounces+chris.thorgrimsson=lamrc.com at cairographics.org [mailto:cairo-bounces+chris.thorgrimsson=lamrc.com at cairographics.org] On Behalf Of Lucan1d Beetle
Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 3:47 AM
To: cairo at cairographics.org
Subject: [cairo] Questions about Cairo and Windows

I am looking for a 2D graphics toolkit for a new large project and Cairo is looking promising but one of the requirements I have is that the software runs well on Windows 7 so I would appreciate answers to the following questions:


 1.  Does Cairo run as well on Windows as it does on other platforms (i.e. Linux)?
 2.  Can I build Cairo on Windows or do I have to wait for GTK or someone else to build the latest version and release the binaries?
 3.  Can Cairo be built using Visual Studio 2010 or be built in such a way that the resulting library works well with code built using Visual Studio 2010?
 4.  In which Windows contexts/containers/frames can Cairo run such as Win32, MFC or WPF?
 5.  Are there any known issues, limitations or "gotchas" related to running Cairo on Windows?

Thanks,

-Lucan1d-
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