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 has been in use in

Google Chrome ChromeOS ChromiumOS Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Thunderbird Android Firefox OS Flutter (before version 3.47) Ladybird, Avalonia (from Alpha 4) LibreOffice (from version 7.0) RAD Studio(since version 12.0) Jetbrains Compose Multiplatform (forked as Skiko) Shopify React Native Skia

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.

See also

Direct2D Starling Framework Anti-Grain Geometry CoreGraphics Cairo QuickDraw GX

References

External links

Skia & Freetype – Android 2D Graphics Essentials Pathfinder 3

YouTube

Google Developers: Painting in Chromium, 2012 on YouTube