My idea was to more or less merge Image and Layer objects, with some lazy components to save memory for opaque images.

Your solution is cooler though, but it's not something I will find time to do.

For now there is Cairo.GTK2Context which can be created from a drawable, like GTK2.DrawingArea. So something like this:

{ ... drawing_area->signal_connect("expose-event", handle_expose); ... }

void handle_expose(GTK2.Widget widget, ...) { Cairo.Context ctx = Cairo.GTK2Context(widget); /* draw using ctx */ }

lets you paint to it.

Don't know. What I use is the function 'gdk_cairo_create', and in case of a GTK version older than 2.7.x I have included it with the distribution (prior the function doesn't exist). That version does most certainly not work with win32 since it uses cairo_xlib_surface_create.