Adobe’s Generic Image Library

Adobe has released a new library via opensource.adobe.com, called GIL, or Generic Image Library.

It's an interesting library for a couple of reasons. One is that it's pushing the power of generics in C++ to let you create generic graphics algorithms that can work on images without having to write a specific version of the algorithm for every pixel format you want to support (a pain I've been through), and the other (which I just think is cool) is that Bjarne Stroustrup is credited as a reviewer.

Adobe' Software Technology Lab is a research group within Adobe that's releasing their stuff through opensource.adobe.com.

I generally find templates in C++ to be more trouble than they're worth unless you're talking about collections, but STLab is doing some cool stuff with both Adam/Eve and with GIL. It's more like language research than library research - good luck porting this stuff to anything but C++ - but it is a great example of the kind of power you can wring out of C++.