Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

blogs.igalia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 181 posts

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#14

Post by emersion »

quaintdev wrote: post #11
DennisAleynikov wrote: post #4

Awesome! Glad to see skia is finding uses in places other than fuschia

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think Flutter also uses Skia for rendering UI

FWIW Flutter is now moving sway from Skia, they are migrating to a dedicated custom GPU renderer (Impeller).

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#16

Post by thrwwycbr »

andsoitis wrote: post #6

> but none of them met all our requirements, so we decided to try writing our own library. Question requirements. You can always find a reason to build rather than buy, but can you reframe your requirements in such a way that you can get away with something off the shelf and then rather spend your resources on the things that you can do uniquely different for your application.

Maybe try to build your own Browser and try to keep up with upstream that has daily changes in the hundreds of commits...and then realize how elitarian that answer was?

They are a software product fork used by billions, with a team that doesn't get paid to develop on it, with not enough funding to just "buy" a battle tested library which has zero problems; because any bug would literally potentially break the web for years.

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#18

Post by thrwwycbr »

ho_schi wrote: post #3

I think this are good news for WebKitGtk . I wondered about the license because they had already problems with LibWebTRC which uses BoringSSL (BSD-License). Skia seems to use the new BSD-License without the advertising clause and is therefore compatible with the GPL. PS: As valleyer mentions - this affects WebKitGtk not all WebKit ports? At least Skia is usable on MacOS/iOS.

I think they try to unify their rendering workflow, just like chromium did when they forked off blink and switched to skia.

In WebKit, however, that implies that they refactor the Bridge API that is used in between contexts and processes which was an internal API before and broke away often.

So I'd guess they start to do incremental changes on the Web API implementations first before they break too much anywhere else (e.g. sidebars, UIs, widgets, devtools are rendered differently but rely on the very same Bridge API)

Re: WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering

#19

Post by mort96 »

tapirl wrote: post #13

So will they maintain a stable C API to skia? It is long-time known pain point that the skia official doesn't provide a usable C API.

Why would they? The API they (WebKit) are providing is the Canvas API, the fact that they're using Skia behind the scenes is an implementation detail... I don't see why they would go through the trouble of maintaining a stable C API for internal use in a C++ project?
Post reply on HN