I'll see about contributing to your project in some way. I'm interested in how Cairo's new opengl backend operates, animation works somewhat ok with a win32 backend but it seems to quickly eat up performance (that could be my mistake though). I'll give a shot at using the cairo opengl backend via Derelict.
Also, the Cairo team recommends using pangocairo over Cairo's native text rendering API functions for anything more complicated than simple text rendering. The Pango dev and bin package from http://www.gtk.org/download/index.php contains the pangocairo.h header file which imports cairo.h, but pango also has a ton of other headers so this might well be out of the scope of your project. I haven't tried used pango's text rendering yet.