Skia Graphics
 

Another company that Google acquired in order to open-source its code
<http://code.google.com/p/skia/>.

“Skia” was the code name for Apple’s old QuickDraw GX project from the early
1990s. And there was a Mike Reed involved with that as well. Coincidence?

Other similarities, from a quick look over the docs
<http://skia.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/docs/html/index.html>:
* 3x3 matrices with perspective distortions. Even the option to use “fixed”
and “fract” instead of floating-point (I suppose embedded applications don’t
necessarily have floating-point hardware universally available—yet).
* SkDescriptor looks just like the old “collections” from the GX Printing
Manager.
* SkPaint looks like a combination of (parts of) the old gxInk and gxStyle
objects.

Differences:
* Not really a retained-mode API, by the looks of things.
* No support for non-RGB colour spaces like XYZ, YUV and CMYK.
* They’ve added support for gradients.
* Blur filtering. But SVG supports more filter types than this.
* Not sure if the pixel operations are the same: Skia offers the usual
Porter-Duff operators, while GX had a much more intricate system.
* Paths can have both quadratic (as in GX) and cubic Bézier segments.
* Low-level access to scan-line conversion, by the looks of things:
SkBlitter, SkScan.