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WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

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Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#141

Post by tadfisher »

leetrout wrote: post #124

Couple things I've seen in this space looking around the past couple weeks... Flutter made a different engine called Impeller[0] which is replacing Skia. Which is a bit surprising as an ignorant outsider. I hope that works out. Rive ( https://rive.app ), is a new animation tool that targets multiple platforms including web and their CEO Guido Rosso gave a great interview on School of Motion[1] about how they are buil…

There's also the GTK Scene Graph Kit[0], which just added GPU-accelerated path drawing and is shaping up to be a decent Cairo replacement.

0: https://docs.gtk.org/gsk4/

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#142

Post by rezmason »

I really like how much utility we've all managed to get from Cairo. It is everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(graphics)#Notable_usage

I don't know the full story behind it, but from an outsider's point of view, any open library that pulls that kind of weight for so long should be considered a major feat of engineering.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#143

Post by miohtama »

I thought always that Safari was the fastest to render web pages on Mac/iOS. But sounds like I was wrong?

> In December 2023 we made the decision of giving Skia a try internally and see if it would be worth the effort of maintaining the project as a third party module inside WebKit. In just one month we had implemented enough features to be able to run all MotionMark tests. The results in the desktop were quite impressive, getting double the score of MotionMark global result. We still had to do more tests in embedded devices which are the actual target of WPE, but it was clear that, at least in the desktop, with this very initial implementation that was not even optimized (we kept our current architecture that is optimized for CPU rendering) we got much better results.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#144

Post by TheTon »

miohtama wrote: post #143

I thought always that Safari was the fastest to render web pages on Mac/iOS. But sounds like I was wrong? > In December 2023 we made the decision of giving Skia a try internally and see if it would be worth the effort of maintaining the project as a third party module inside WebKit. In just one month we had implemented enough features to be able to run all MotionMark tests. The results in the desktop were quite impre…

This post seems to be just about the GTK port of WebKit. So they’re comparing Skia vs Cairo on Linux. There’s no mention of Skia vs CoreGraphics for macOS. It doesn’t sound like that is something that is being considered.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#145

Post by Asm2D »

hgs3 wrote: post #134
Asm2D wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cairo is in a maintenance-only mode. Nobody develops this library anymore and it only has a maintainer or two. Since nobody really worked on Cairo in the past 15 years it's not optimized for modern hardware. You can see some existing benchmarks here: - https://blend2d.com/performance.html Both the benchmarking tool and Blend2D are open-source projects so anyone can verify the numbers presented are indeed correct, and…

> Cairo is in a maintenance-only mode. That's too bad. Is their a successor planned or is Skia the recommended alternative?

I think that when it comes to 2D rendering libraries there is in general not too many options if you want to target CPU or both CPU+GPU. Targeting GPU-only is bad for users that run on a hardware where GPU doesn't perform well or is not available at all due to driver issues or just not present (like servers).

If you consider libraries that offer CPU rendering there are basically:

  - AGG (CPU only)

  - Blend2D (CPU only, GPU planned, but not now)

  - Cairo (CPU only)

  - Qt's QPainter (CPU only, GPU without anti-aliasing / deprecated)

  - Skia (CPU + GPU)

  - Tiny Skia (CPU only, not focused on performance)

  - GPU only libs (there is many in C++ and Rust)
Nobody develops AGG and Cairo anymore and Qt's QPainter hasn't really improved in the past decade (Qt Company's focus is QtQuick, which doesn't use QPainter, so they don't really care about improving the performance of QPainter). So, only 2 libraries from this list have active development - Blend2D and Skia.

As an author of Blend2D I hope that it will be a go-to replacement for both AGG and Cairo users. Architecturally, Blend2D should be fine after a 1.0 release as the plan is to offer a stable ABI with 1.0 - And since Blend2D only exports C-API it should be a great choice for users who want to use every cycle and who want their code to work instead of making changes every time the dependency is updated (hello Skia).

At the moment Blend2D focuses on AGG users though, because AGG is much more widespread in commercial applications due to its licensing model and extensibility. However, AGG is really slow especially when rendering to large images (like 4K) so switching from AGG to Blend2D can offer a great performance benefits while avoiding other architectural changes of the application itself.

BTW Blend2D is still under active development. It started as an experiment and historically it only offered great performance on X86 platforms, but that is changing with a new JIT backend, which provides both X86 and AArch64 support and is almost ready for merge. This is good news as it will enable great performance on Apple hardware and also other AArch64 devices, basically covering 99% of the market.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#146

Post by c-smile »

c-smile wrote: post #101
coffeeaddict1 wrote: post #37

Skia is a great library, but as all things Google it's a pain to build. They don't use CMake and building it from source takes 20-30 minutes on a modern laptop. Furthermore, it's constantly changing its APIs and much of it is undocumented and unclear on how to use optimally. Most of the decisions taken by development team aren't discussed in the open and this makes it hard to understand the codebase. I wish there was…

> it's a pain to build Yes. So in Sciter I've replaced its build system with relatively simple premake5 script. That replacement took couple of days but was worth it. Premake5 generates human-readable IDE solutions and make files. So you need just a compiler to build the whole thing. > building it from source takes 20-30 minutes on a modern laptop. It is not that bad actually. Just tried full rebuild of x64/Windows v…

About premake5 in general.

premake5 is a monolithic/portable executable that contains Lua + specific runtime.

Thus it does not rely on installed Python as in GN case as other tools.

Having standard and well known and documented Lua on board benefits the maker a lot. In my opinion any modern build system must include generic and known PL.

And that above is the problem of modern CMake. It started as simple static declarative thing but life forced it to evolve into dynamic programming language with very strange notation and runtime model.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#147

Post by danielvaughn »

leetrout wrote: post #124

Couple things I've seen in this space looking around the past couple weeks... Flutter made a different engine called Impeller[0] which is replacing Skia. Which is a bit surprising as an ignorant outsider. I hope that works out. Rive ( https://rive.app ), is a new animation tool that targets multiple platforms including web and their CEO Guido Rosso gave a great interview on School of Motion[1] about how they are buil…

I've been following Rive for a while, it's an interesting approach. I think it was a response to the fact that Lottie was tied to AdobeXD (I think?). I'm not sure if Rive's renderer is open source though.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#148

Post by rubymamis »

Asm2D wrote: post #145
hgs3 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cairo is in a maintenance-only mode. That's too bad. Is their a successor planned or is Skia the recommended alternative?

I think that when it comes to 2D rendering libraries there is in general not too many options if you want to target CPU or both CPU+GPU. Targeting GPU-only is bad for users that run on a hardware where GPU doesn't perform well or is not available at all due to driver issues or just not present (like servers). If you consider libraries that offer CPU rendering there are basically: - AGG (CPU only) - Blend2D (CPU only,…

Qt Quick should support non-GPU rendering[1]. I don't know how good it is, tho.

[1] https://www.toradex.com/blog/running-qt-without-gpu

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#149

Post by mardifoufs »

tadfisher wrote: post #141
leetrout wrote: post #124

Couple things I've seen in this space looking around the past couple weeks... Flutter made a different engine called Impeller[0] which is replacing Skia. Which is a bit surprising as an ignorant outsider. I hope that works out. Rive ( https://rive.app ), is a new animation tool that targets multiple platforms including web and their CEO Guido Rosso gave a great interview on School of Motion[1] about how they are buil…

There's also the GTK Scene Graph Kit[0], which just added GPU-accelerated path drawing and is shaping up to be a decent Cairo replacement. 0: https://docs.gtk.org/gsk4/

Completely ignorant question: what's the issue with Cairo? I know it has had a hard time getting maintained but is there any article or blog talking about how it works or how it doesn't work? I've never used it directly but I'm super curious to know more !

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#150

Post by a_e_k »

Asm2D wrote: post #145
hgs3 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cairo is in a maintenance-only mode. That's too bad. Is their a successor planned or is Skia the recommended alternative?

I think that when it comes to 2D rendering libraries there is in general not too many options if you want to target CPU or both CPU+GPU. Targeting GPU-only is bad for users that run on a hardware where GPU doesn't perform well or is not available at all due to driver issues or just not present (like servers). If you consider libraries that offer CPU rendering there are basically: - AGG (CPU only) - Blend2D (CPU only,…

I'm the author of another CPU-only 2D vector graphics library that might be of interest:

- Canvas Ity (https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity)

It's a tiny single-header C++ library in the style of the STB libraries. My aim was to make it dirt simple to be able to drop into almost any project and get high-quality rendering while providing an API comfortable to those used to .

I've been checking out Blend2D every now and then. It seems like a very nice option for the bigger, but faster and more fully-featured end of the spectrum.

(Though for what it's worth, while raw performance isn't my priority, my little library still can hit about 70fps rendering the Postscript Tiger to 733x757 res with a single thread on my 7950x. :-)

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