Mesa is a 3D graphics library with an accompanying toolkit consisting of more than 250 individual tools. The library provides a broad range of graphics algorithms and features, and is used in both open source and commercial software. Mesa is also the underlying graphics engine in the popular game engine Unity.
Mesa began in 1993 as an open source project by Brian Paul, a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The project was originally called GLU, but was later renamed Mesa. The name change was made to avoid confusion with the GLU library, which is a part of the OpenGL standard library.
Mesa is written in the C programming language and is released under the terms of the MIT License. The project is managed by an open governance model, with contributions from a community of developers.
Mesa is a cross-platform library, with implementations for Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android. The library has been ported to a wide variety of architectures, including x86, ARM, and PowerPC.
Mesa provides a software renderer, called llvmpipe, which uses the LLVM compiler infrastructure to compile programs written in the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) to native code. llvmpipe is used as a fallback when hardware-accelerated graphics is not available.
Mesa also provides a Gallium3D driver architecture, which allows graphics drivers to be implemented in a portable way. Gallium3D drivers are used by a number of graphics cards, including AMD Radeon, Intel Iris, and Nvidia GeForce.
The Mesa toolkit includes a number of utilities for debugging, profiling, and optimizing graphics programs. The toolkit also includes a shader compiler, called glslang, which can be used to compile GLSL shaders to Mesa's intermediate representation (IR).
Mesa is used in a wide variety of software projects, both open source and commercial. Notable projects that use Mesa include the GNOME desktop environment, the Firefox web browser, the LibreOffice office suite, and the Unity game engine.
Mesa is a powerful graphics library that provides a broad range of features and algorithms. The library is used in a wide variety of software projects, both open source and commercial. The Mesa toolkit includes a number of utilities that can be used to debug, profile, and optimize graphics programs.