That's interesting. I wrote my patches to not only separate the FreeType and FontConfig backends but also to solve an annoying thread-safety issue in the design of Cairo (at the time). This is all explained in the following file: <a href="http://david.freetype.org/cairo/RATIONALE">http://david.freetype.org/cairo/RATIONALE</a> It's been a very long time since I haven't looked at the Cairo sources, and I don't know if the problem still exist though. <div class="gmail_quote">2009/3/10 Surith <<a href="mailto:cairo@surith.net">cairo@surith.net</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <div class="im">>> I think there are some issues with synchronization when fontconfig is >> completely removed. > > Which ones ? </div>I attempted to use Cairo in a single-threaded environment, with freetype but without fontconfig. As part of this I used the patches from David Turner. I also defined CAIRO_NO_MUTEX and built without threading support (--disable-pthread.) Only one font was used on this system - previously loaded using freetype. There were also other restrictions - in particular that malloc/free could not be used... I used custom functions to allocate memory. Cairo did run successfully after some hacking. I was wrong when I said that there were synchronization issues, sorry. I should have instead said that I had to modify Cairo, with these patches applied, to build and run with mutexes disabled. </blockquote></div>