Developer(s) Maxim Shemanarev Operating system License GPL | Written in C++ Type Graphics library | |
Stable release 2.5.0 / October 1, 2006; 10 years ago (2006-10-01) | ||
Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) is a high-quality 2D rendering library written in C++. It features anti-aliasing and sub-pixel resolution. It is not a graphics library, per se, but rather a framework to build a graphics library upon.
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The library is operating system independent and renders to an abstract memory object. It comes with examples interfaced to the X Window System, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, AmigaOS, BeOS, SDL. The examples also include an SVG viewer.
The design of AGG uses C++ templates only at a very high level, rather than extensively, to achieve the flexibility to plug custom classes into the rendering pipeline, without requiring a rigid class hierarchy, and allows the compiler to inline many of the method calls for high performance. For a library of its complexity, it is remarkably lightweight: it has no dependencies above the standard C++ libraries and it avoids the C++ STL in the implementation of the basic algorithms. The implicit interfaces are not well documented, however, and this can make the learning process quite cumbersome.
While AGG version 2.5 is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or greater, AGG version 2.4 is still available under the 3-clause BSD license and is virtually the same as version 2.5.
History
Active development of the AGG codebase stalled in 2006, around the time of the v2.5 release, due to shifting priorities of its primary developer Maxim Shemanarev. Shemanarev remained active in the community until his sudden death in November, 2013. Development has continued on a fork of the more liberally licensed v2.4 on SourceForge.net.