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Skia Graphics Engine

Open source graphics library written in C++

Open source graphics library written in C++

FieldValue
nameSkia Graphics Engine
titleSkia Graphics Engine
logoSkia_Project_Logo.svg
logo size175px
screenshot
authorSkia Inc.
developerGoogle
released
latest release date
latest preview date
programming languageC++
operating systemAndroid, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows
genreGraphics library
licenseNew BSD License
website

The Skia Graphics Engine or Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library written in C++. Skia abstracts away platform-specific graphics APIs (which differ from one to another). Skia Inc. originally developed the library; Google acquired it in 2005, and then released the software as open source licensed under the New BSD free software license in 2008.

Overview

In order to stay multi-platform, Skia supports several (platform-dependent) back-ends. These include:

  • CPU software rasterization
  • Portable Document Format (PDF) output
  • GPU-accelerated rendering by using:
    • ANGLE backend, which translates OpenGL ES calls into vendor's native APIs
    • Vulkan, and Metal.
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
  • XML Paper Specification (XPS)

Skia is most similar in purpose to Cairo or Pathfinder (meaning that it focuses on drawing) rather than to other more elaborate APIs like that of Qt that provide their own widgets and UI description language etc.

Application

The library is used in Google Chrome, ChromeOS, ChromiumOS, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Android, Firefox OS, Flutter, Ladybird, Avalonia (from Alpha 4), LibreOffice (from version 7.0) and RAD Studio(since version 12.0).

Supported platforms

  • Windows 10, 11
  • macOS 10.15 or later
  • iOS 12 or later
  • Android 4.3 (JellyBean) or later
  • Ubuntu 18.04+, Debian 10+, openSUSE 15.2+, or Fedora Linux 32+
  • Web Browsers

Etymology

Skia is a romanisation of the word 'shadow' in Greek (Σκιά).

History

Skia Inc, developers of the Skia Graphics Engine, was founded in 2004 by Mike Reed and Cary Clark in Chapel Hill North Carolina, before being acquired by Google in 2005.

References

References

  1. "Skia Graphics Library".
  2. Malik, Om. (2 Sep 2008). "Google Open Sources Skia Graphics Engine". gigaom.
  3. "Specialized Builds".
  4. "The Skia 2D Graphics Library From Google - Phoronix".
  5. "Skia Documentation".
  6. "RAD Studio".
  7. "CanvasKit - Skia + WebAssembly".
  8. (2017-05-24). "Inside Google's Chapel Hill outpost: A growing success story {{!}} WRAL TechWire".
Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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