cairometal 0.1.0

A pycairo-compatible 2D vector-graphics backend that renders on the Apple GPU via Metal. Independent project — not affiliated with the cairo project or pycairo.

cairometal

A pycairo-compatible 2D vector-graphics backend that renders on the Apple GPU via Metal.

Independent project — not affiliated with the cairo graphics library or the official pycairo binding. It reimplements a compatible surface/context API on top of Metal.

Requirements

• macOS (Apple Silicon). Metal is an Apple framework; there are no Linux/Windows builds.
• Python 3.10+.

Install

pip install cairometal

Wheels are published per-CPython-version for macOS arm64. There is no on-the-fly compilation at install time — you get a prebuilt binary.

Usage

The API mirrors pycairo, so existing pycairo code largely works by changing the import:

import cairometal as cairo

surface = cairo.ImageSurface(cairo.FORMAT_ARGB32, 256, 256)
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)

ctx.set_source_rgb(0.13, 0.42, 0.96)
ctx.rectangle(32, 32, 192, 192)
ctx.fill()

ctx.set_source_rgb(1, 1, 1)
ctx.move_to(60, 140)
ctx.set_font_size(40)
ctx.show_text("Metal")

surface.write_to_png("out.png")   # rasterized on the GPU

What it is

cairometal implements cairo's drawing model — paths, fills, strokes, clips, groups, gradients, text, image surfaces, PNG output — with the rasterization running on the GPU through Metal. It's useful where you have GPU-bound 2D vector work; for light/typical cairo workloads the CPU pycairo is perfectly fine.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.