Using Cairo on iPhone?

Question

I'm doing some work on a potentially cross-platform C++ application and for Windows and OS X it seems that Cairo will meet most of my needs for 2D graphics and allow me to share a lot of code between platforms. In an ideal world I'd really like to be able to use the same (or very similar) drawing code in iPhone/iPad apps.

I realise that this means that I'll need to compile Cairo for iPhone before I try to use it, but I've got no real idea on how to go about this.

If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be very grateful.

Answer 1

To update this for anyone who happens to try going down the same route as I did, I never did get it to compile (I didn't get much response from the Cairo mailing list when I asked for suggestions). It seems that Cairo isn't really a very good idea for iOS or OSX. I've recently come across this post which pretty clearly says that it's not stable on iOS or OSX.

I'm now quite glad that I made the decision to ditch Cairo as my cross-platform graphics method and go to a home-brew/native method. Although it involves a bit more effort, it's been a pretty good compromise for what I was trying to achieve.

Answer 2

On Windows I've compiled Cairo using Visual Studio like this:

• libpng-1.2.40
• zlib-1.2.3
• pixman-0.16.2
• cairo-1.8.8

Since Cairo will be using Quartz for font and text handling you will not have to compile Pango (which has Glib as dependency) and FreeType. I assume the setup for iPhone should be similar.

This entry from Vladimir Vukićević's blog shows that Cairo runs on iPhone since 2008 :)