Creating images on the fly

Good morning!
I'm looking for a program or perl module that I can use to create images on the fly. Mainly basic shapes like circles, squares, minimalistic graphs, and perhaps some printing words onto these images. This will mainly be using either in CGI or inserted directly into MySQL and I would prefer not writing tempfiles to disk.

I used to use GD to do this, but I was wondering if anyone knows any better tools. Is GD still used or is it deprecated?

Thanks in advance.