Which renderer for a browser?

I'm actually doing a little browser which should be able to parse some code, display a GUI (mainly based on svg elements) and let the user interact with it.

Which renderer should I use to paint the GUI?

Probably in the future this browser will need 3D capabilities - or, at least, a 3D widget. Because of this I was thinking of using something like GLUT (this is not paid work and time is not a limit) but I'm a bit scared about performance on gpuless machines.

I mean, how well woul开发者_运维问答d scale some simple 2d GLUT-based code on a machine without a gpu? Will it run as well as code based on something else like cairo?

I'm trying to keep this project as light as possible and using something like QT (which would be perfect for this task) is not something I'm very happy with.

If you need both of performance and feature use GL for bitmap/vector graphic rendering with freetype for text rasterization. http://www.freetype.org/ However you have a lot of thing should be implemented.

And forget about software (GPU-less) rendering until regular CPU have hundreds of cores. Currenty NO GPU-less rendering has acceptable performance in 3D. There is Adobe Flash which proves this. (finally it's shipping with GPU based rendering too :) All of modern GUI frameworks use GPU or designed for GPU. Non-GPU modes is just a last option for compatibility which are not optimal.

Don't use GLUT! It's a very simplicistic framework with a lot of limitations. You're not being forced to use GLUT if you want to use OpenGL.