So Caleb is some sort of coding machine. In the matter of a few days, we've (read: mostly Caleb) (mostly) finished the Cairo backend for librsvg. In honor of this work, I've just released version 2.13.0 (may take a few minutes for the FTP mirrors to sync).

What's the big deal? Well:

• It doesn't use libart.
• It can generate more formats than just PNG - drawing to PDF, X11, Win32, Quartz, PS should all be possible now.
• More conformant output - with the exception of some CSS and text, we nearly pass the W3C SVG 1.1 conformance test. We even beat Batik's conformance for a few tests...
• It is significantly faster than its libart-based counterpart - on some tests, it's 6x faster than the libart backend. Using pre-multiplied RGBA clearly has some performance penalties.
• It has the beginnings of a DOM API.
• Did I mention that it doesn't use libart?

The library is stable - it can handle our own test suite, the W3C suite, and Batik's suite without incident. Only in 1 of the 182 W3C conformance tests did I notice any appreciable memory leakage directly responsible by librsvg (which we'll be correcting shortly). All told, this is one rockin' release. Carl, Caleb, Chris - you all rock. Thanks.

I will warn consumers of the library that the API and ABI have changed to accomodate this work. It's mostly backward-compatible, but there are some changes to be aware of. I expect the API and ABI to change further during the release cycle as things get ironed out and the DOM API formalizes. Caveat emptor.