Agar is a powerful open-source, cross-platform toolkit for graphical applications in C, C++ or Objective-C (bindings to Perl and Ada are also available). Designed for ease of integration, Agar follows the philosophy of building the GUI around the application, and not the other way around. Agar applications should work seamlessly under any platform, and Agar itself should work without relying on other libraries (Agar 1.4 can be compiled without dependencies, and has even been used on embedded devices without filesystems or operating systems at all). When compiled with optional threads support, Agar's entire documented API is thread-safe.

The AG_Driver interface makes Agar applications portable to a wide variety of platforms, APIs and graphics systems (in either vector or raster mode). Agar applications can work under window-based platforms (such as Xlib, Windows API and MacOS X Quartz/Cocoa), and non-window-based environments (such as an SDL context). Unlike most GUI toolkits, Agar takes maximum advantage of modern graphics hardware where it is available, minimizing movement of data between CPU and GPU.

The base Agar library is intended to be as general and compact as possible. Separate libraries targetting more specialized applications include Agar-MATH (optimized math extensions), Agar-VG (vector graphics) and Agar-DEV (developer tools). The Agar-based FreeSG library implements a 2D/3D engine system with constraint solver and computational geometry routines. The Edacious suite implements a set of Agar classes useful in electronics design.

Agar is free software. Its source code is freely usable and re-usable by everyone under a BSD license, which allows use in commercial applications free of charge. Agar is stable, well-maintained and has been growing organically since 2002.

The Agar project is sponsored by Csoft.net Hosting and ElectronTubeStore.com.

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If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact the maintainer. There are also forums and an #agar channel on irc.freenode.net (here is a web interface to it).

Your feedback and contributions help us build a better library with better documentation. Don't hesitate to send us your bug reports and enhancement/feature requests with Bugzilla.