I wanted to see how much faster cairo could produce simple images when threaded vs iterated on the main thread.

done, in 0.007900s (Single Threaded)

done, in 0.024525s (Multi Threaded)

So the single threaded execution takes approximately one third of the time of the threaded version. This must be due to the overhead of creating new pthreads and waiting for the completion on each one, rather than just blasting ahead with the next iteration.

stdio.h - input and output

stdlib.h - signals

pthread.h - threading

assert.h - error checking

cairo.h - drawing

unistd.h - posix APIs e.g "sleep"

string.h - strings

time.h - measuring the length of execution

If you need Cairo, get it from https://cairographics.org/download/