121–130 of 181 posts
I was curious how Igalia was funded and this was a surprisingly good interview on how they’re structured, how they work with the major browser companies, etc… Apparently many Apple, Google, Firefox engineers left to work for them. https://thenewstack.io/igalia-the-open-source-powerhouse-you...
It's in my city. Their offices are just a small flat in in a pretty bland neighborhood. I guess most of them work remote.
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> I wish there was a nice and small vector graphics library with GPU acceleration. I'm personally skeptical about GPU acceleration being the answer to 2D rendering for various reasons. I'm looking forward to Blend2D https://blend2d.com/ > which is JIT based maturing and being the preferred solution.
What happened to Cairo the 2d graphics tool?
> There was an attempt at making Cairo support GPU rendering, which did not work particularly well due to the library being designed around stateful operation based upon the PostScript model—resulting in a convenient and familiar API, great output quality, but hard to retarget and with some particularly slow corner cases. Meanwhile, other web engines have moved more work to the GPU, including 2D rendering, where many operations are considerably faster.
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…
Check out nanovg: https://github.com/memononen/nanovg
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 building an animation first vector engine. There is a side by side demo at 46:56[2] of Skia, Impeller and Rive.
0: https://docs.flutter.dev/perf/impeller
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I have an open source project that uses Skia, and I just keep static libraries for all target platforms because the Skia build process is so painful. Maybe once a year I bite the bullet, do a new Skia build on all the platforms, and then I have to figure out how the C++ API has changed. At least that’s just rote work of fixing compiler errors by looking at the new header files. Even though it’s a pain in the ass, I s…
Out of curiosity, why do you rebuild? What kinds of new features would get you to want to upgrade?
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GPU support was removed from Cairo, because it was slower than CPU rendering and nobody wanted to maintain it.
Cairo's OpenGL support was removed, but I thought Cairo's X11 backend still has GPU acceleration for a few operations through XRender (depending on your video driver).
Somewhat connected question, what is WPE? It’s something that got abstracted out of WebkitGTK, right? Is it a standalone port itself, or is it more like the framework to build a highly specialized one? I’ve seen at least in past versions that libwpe is an optional dependency of WebkitGTK, so they didn’t like abstract and then rebase it on the new component. Or is libwpe separate from WPE?
Looking at https://webkit.org/wpe/, the first design goal is the one that justifies WPE vs other webkit ports: "To provide a no-frills, straight to the point, web runtime for embedded devices."
The other goals, like standards compliant and hardware acceleration, are there to differentiate WPE from non-webkit and ancient-webkit browser engines that people might use on embedded devices.
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I have an open source project that uses Skia, and I just keep static libraries for all target platforms because the Skia build process is so painful. Maybe once a year I bite the bullet, do a new Skia build on all the platforms, and then I have to figure out how the C++ API has changed. At least that’s just rote work of fixing compiler errors by looking at the new header files. Even though it’s a pain in the ass, I s…
Out of curiosity, why do you rebuild? What kinds of new features would get you to want to upgrade?