Cairo is the drawing API that is used predominantly by the GTK stack along with Firefox and couple of ports of WebKit. It is designed as a comprehensible page layout API rather than as a high performance interface to the GPU. It is Cairo's job to bridge the gap between an easy-to-use drawing model and efficient rendering. This is not always as easy as it sounds...
The talk will present the origins of Cairo, its successes, some of its failures, and the promising technologies for the future.