Glitz (software)

Infobox Software
name = glitz
developer = Peter Nilsson,
David Reveman
latest release version = 0.5.6
latest release date = May 20, 2006
programming language = C
operating system = Cross-platform
genre = Graphics library
license = MIT License
website = http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/glitz

Glitz is a software library for 2D graphics which provides hardware acceleration using OpenGL, an API for 3D graphics. Glitz is open-source software, licensed under (an old variant of) the MIT License. Development is hosted at freedesktop.org.

Glitz plays a strategic role in graphics for open-source operating systems. [Citation
first=Peter |last=Nilsson
first2=David |last2=Reveman |author2-link=David Reveman
contribution=Glitz: Hardware Accelerated Image Compositing using OpenGL
contribution-url=http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix04/tech/freenix/nilsson.html
title=Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference
year=2004
publisher=Usenix]

Facilities provided

Glitz was designed to provide the same facilities as XRender:
*Alpha compositing
*Anti-aliasing
*Subpixel rendering
*Rendering geometrical figures and text
*Geometric transformations such as translation, rotation and scalingAs with XRender, the key operation that Glitz provides is Porter-Duff composition.

Glitz also provides some facilities that XRender does not:
*Color gradients
*Convolution filters

oftware that uses Glitz

Glitz is the key component of the Xgl X server, which used to be shipped with most Linux distributions. [http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~cyberorg/2008/07/26/rip-xgl/]

The increasingly popular Cairo graphics library supports Glitz as a backend, meaning that a few lines of code will enable any of the applications and toolkits which use Cairo to take advantage of graphics hardware.

References