A cairo-device-t structure represents the driver interface for drawing operations to a cairo-surface-t instance. There are different subtypes of cairo-device-t structures for different drawing backends. For example, the function cairo-egl-device-create creates a device that wraps an EGL display and context.

The type of a device can be queried with the function cairo-device-get-type.

Memory management of the cairo-device-t structure is done with the functions cairo-device-reference and cairo-device-destroy.