Comparing CD with Other Graphics Libraries

There are other graphics libraries, with some portability among operational systems, available on the Internet. Among them we can highlight:

• VOGL - A Very Ordinary GL-Like Library. It is very similar to the CD library, but it has no longer been updated since 1995. It has several drivers, 2D and 3D routines, and illumination. http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~philippe/vogl/.
• SRGP - Based on Foley's book, the code has not been found. It is aimed only at display. http://www.micg.et.fh-stralsund.de/~pohlers/srgp.html.
• GGI - 2D graphics library aimed only at display. http://www.ggi-project.org/.
• GKS - Very complete 2D and 3D graphics library, but with limited image resources. It is an ISO standard, and it implementations are usually commercial. Tecgraf has an implementation of GKS which is no longer used, being replaced by CD. http://www.bsi.org.uk/sc24/.
• Mesa - 3D graphics library with support to the OpenGL standard. Implemented in C. Aimed only at display, with attribute functions for illumination and shading features. http://www.mesa3d.org/.
• OpenGL - 3D graphics library with some 2D support. Aimed only at display. A window CD canvas can coexist with an OpenGL canvas at the same time. Note: When Double Buffer is used, do not forget to swap buffer before redrawing with the CD library. http://www.opengl.org.
• GD - Library only for drawing on images, saves PNG files. Implemented in C. http://www.boutell.com/gd/.
• GDK - Used by the GTK user interface toolkit. Implemented in C. Aimed only at display, and contains several functions for managing windows, keyboard and mouse. http://www.gtk.org/.
• CAIRO - A vector graphics library designed to provide high-quality display and print output. Very interesting, lots of functions, seems to render in bitmaps on native systems. http://cairographics.org/.

Most of them are aimed only at one type of driver, usually display or images, and sometimes user interface routines were also included. Others add 3D drawing routines, as well as scene illumination routines. All this unnecessarily increases their complexity and does not make them more complete as 2D graphic libraries.

There are also several Graphics User Interface libraries that contain drawing functions.

As to performance, CD is as good as any other, in some cases having a better performance. Thus, the CD library offers unique features and quality as a portable 2D graphic library.