One project I found fascinating reading a while back when I was working on graphics, is AGG. It's a vector graphics toolkit, a bit like Cairo, Quartz 2D or Java 2D. It uses a particular style of C++ - a mixture of template programming together with regular polymorphism - to build up a collection of rendering components. The components are almost Unix-like - you plug them together to build your customized rendering pipeline, and the C++ compiler's template logic takes care of making everything hardwired (or dynamic, if you choose to use the polymorphic components):
http://www.antigrain.com/
The end result is a toolkit which is at a lower level than Quartz 2D et al, but could easily be used to build such an API. It can also be adapted for embedded, or high precision uses.
those help. if you can figure out the source code without the documentation at the agg site + those files, more power to you. but basically you are nuts.
Thanks for the links, I've never seen those before. I read the agg code without the docs, but it would have been difficult without the example programs. The docs definitely help when looking at some of the algorithms though. I remember spending a good day or two staring at the anti-aliasing code, together with the freetype rasterizer (on which it was based), trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Then in just clicked.
