Cross-platform drawing library

Question

I\'ve been looking for a good cross-platform 2D drawing library that can be called from C++ and can be used to draw some fairly simple geometry; lines, rectangles, circles,

Answer 1

I would go for AGG or Cairo.

Answer 2

Another one: Skia. Used in Android and Chrome, under active development, HW acceleration.

Answer 3

I use CImg: cross platform (self contained single header file), simple, concise. PNG is not natively supported but can be handled if ImageMagick is installed (see supported formats).

See also this related question.

Answer 4

You might use Allegro 5 (since SDL and SFML are mentioned). This provides all of the platforms you require (and more) and can render shapes and save to PNG. Version 5 has a much improved API and hardware acceleration. With any of these low level cross platform libraries you'd have to find your own charting solution.

I put some notes on my blog about Allegro and using it on the Mac.

Answer 5

There is also libgd - simple one, but well-written.

Regarding Cairo Graphics, I can't believe it renders text that looks bad. If you are particularly concerned about text rendering, State of the Text Rendering from Jan 2010 gives quite good overview.

Answer 6

Try Anti-Grain Geometry. From the description:

Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) is an Open Source, free of charge graphic library, written in industrially standard C++. The terms and conditions of use AGG are described on The License page. AGG doesn't depend on any graphic API or technology. Basically, you can think of AGG as of a rendering engine that produces pixel images in memory from some vectorial data. But of course, AGG can do much more than that. The ideas and the philosophy of AGG are:

• Anti-Aliasing.
• Subpixel Accuracy.
• The highest possible quality.
• High performance.
• Platform independence and compatibility.
• Flexibility and extensibility.
• Lightweight design.
• Reliability and stability (including numerical stability).