Skia Graphics Engine

The Skia Graphics Engine or Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library written in C++. Skia abstracts away platform-specific graphics APIs. 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 back-ends. These include:

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

Skia is most similar in purpose to Cairo or Pathfinder 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, LibreOffice and RAD Studio.

Supported platforms

Windows 10, 11
macOS 10.15 or later
iOS 12 or later
Android 4.3 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.

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.

YouTube

, 2012 on YouTube

Category:Google acquisitions
Category:Graphics libraries
Category:Software using the BSD license