I work in 3D (and 2D) graphics primarily in C++. I don't think the standards committee can come up with anything that'll replace the GPU-accelerated APIs (there's already the Direct3D 12-vs-Vulkan split that's really unlikely to have a clear winner), however, I'd take simpler, CPU-only libs for common tasks:
* Vector and matrix math -- vec2d, vec3d, conversion to quaternion, a matrix library that doesn't suck, overloaded operators, etc. I dabble in Python, always have, and numpy isn't the best lib out there (some things are oddly named, I'm missing the operators, etc) but it's more complete, more usable, and better documented than any lib I've used in C++.
* Basic image manipulation. Like "write bitmap image to PNG" basic. This will never get used for anything serious but will be useful for toy projects/debugging
* Basic intersection tests. This is 2018 and I had to write some variant of (basic geometry primitive) intersects (other basic geometry primitive) using formulas most people probably haven't seen since their SATs 5 times since the beginning of the year, because I at least know the formula by heart by now, whereas all the aforementioned libraries are too verbose, not documented, require linking a huge library, are header-only and will bloat your compilation times by a factor 10, etc.
I agree that such a library should steer well clear of text rendering. Text rendering is really hard, has weird edge cases, and the people who do it have their own favorite library already. But the other stuff I mentioned, that's stuff already present to some extent in the "mainstream" C++ libraries, like boost and Qt.
I think such a library should definitely not be 2D-only. Tons of libraries go that direction (for example Canvas in HTML5) because 2D is easier if you have no hardware acceleration, but even in the 3D space, there are algorithms where usability>performance and currently the people writing those algorithms are copy-pasting left and right and spending hours writing unit tests for high school math.
* Vector and matrix math -- vec2d, vec3d, conversion to quaternion, a matrix library that doesn't suck, overloaded operators, etc. I dabble in Python, always have, and numpy isn't the best lib out there (some things are oddly named, I'm missing the operators, etc) but it's more complete, more usable, and better documented than any lib I've used in C++.
* Basic image manipulation. Like "write bitmap image to PNG" basic. This will never get used for anything serious but will be useful for toy projects/debugging
* Basic intersection tests. This is 2018 and I had to write some variant of (basic geometry primitive) intersects (other basic geometry primitive) using formulas most people probably haven't seen since their SATs 5 times since the beginning of the year, because I at least know the formula by heart by now, whereas all the aforementioned libraries are too verbose, not documented, require linking a huge library, are header-only and will bloat your compilation times by a factor 10, etc.
I agree that such a library should steer well clear of text rendering. Text rendering is really hard, has weird edge cases, and the people who do it have their own favorite library already. But the other stuff I mentioned, that's stuff already present to some extent in the "mainstream" C++ libraries, like boost and Qt.
I think such a library should definitely not be 2D-only. Tons of libraries go that direction (for example Canvas in HTML5) because 2D is easier if you have no hardware acceleration, but even in the 3D space, there are algorithms where usability>performance and currently the people writing those algorithms are copy-pasting left and right and spending hours writing unit tests for high school math.