KEkermatt·Aug 21, 2025
In Zed for Windows: What's Taking So Long?google
skia
C++2016–2025
google / skia
skia
Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images. See documentation for contribution instructions.
15Distinct people
15Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
11KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images. See documentation for contribution instructions.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year15 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-03-26 20:26:19 UTC to 2025-08-21 23:37:44 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
15 sourcesIf you're interested in node-compatible canvas implementations:
- canvaskit-wasm from the skia project - I don't think it's gpu-accelerated: https://github.com/google/skia/tree/main/modules/canvaskit/n...
- @napi-rs/canvas - This is the fastest binding: https://github.com/Brooooooklyn/canvas?tab=readme-ov-file#pe...
- node-canvas - Uses Cairo instead of Skia: https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas
In Skia Canvas: Browserless implementation of the HTML Canvas drawing API for nodeDidn't know about Skia previously! Thank you for the excellent suggestion!
So, let's provide some links:
Overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_Graphics_Engine
Homepage: https://skia.org/
Source: https://skia.googlesource.com/skia/ (or) https://github.com/google/skia
Also -- there's this old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143972 where the following github projects which involve drawing are mentioned:
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx
https://github.com/memononen/nanovg
https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui
In the following article: https://www.cmyr.net/blog/gui-framework-ingredients.html we find the following interesting quote:
>"These APIs exist, in subtly different form, on the various platforms. on macOS, there is CoreGraphics [Quartz 2D], on windows Direct2D, and on linux there is Cairo. One approach, then, is to p
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resent a common API abstraction over top of these platform APIs, puttying over the rough edges and filling in the gaps. (This is the approach we have currently taken, with the piet library.)"
So, some more quick links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct2D
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)
Piet:
https://docs.rs/piet/latest/piet/
https://github.com/linebender/piet
Related: 2018 Paper: "A Proposal to Add 2D Graphics
Rendering and Display to C++":
https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p02...
Not specially something that you cannot do without WASM but at $WORK we are using a WASM build of Skia [0] to render canvas from nodejs.
Why use WASM ? Because we wanted to stay close to our stack (ie. calling wasm from nodejs). Do it work ? Yes, memory consumption is quite heavy though (each WASM module have its own heap that can quickly grow).
However we are looking to directly use Skia now and avoid the overhead of WASM so i think its a nice solution in the beginning but you might want to ditch it later on.
[0]: https://github.com/google/skia/tree/main/modules/canvaskit
In Ask HN: Is WASM (WebAssembly) getting adoption in real use cases?Skia includes a module for path operations: https://github.com/google/skia/blob/main/include/pathops/SkP...
In Deconstructing Bézier CurvesNo, I'm pretty sure it rasterizes using OpenGL ES, too.
I don't know the code well enough to find good proof, but there's a lot of GLES and I think some DX calls in there. More than if it was just composing.
https://github.com/google/skia/tree/main/src/gpu/ganesh/gl
In Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIsMaybe this Skia: https://github.com/google/skia
In Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documentshttps://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/experimental/c-ap...
do you mean this?
In CanvasKit – Skia and WebAssemblyThe NPM package doesn't list any dependencies:
https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/modules/canvaskit...
I'm not saying you are wrong, but if the NPM package needed more stuff it would be in the package.json, no?
In CanvasKit – Skia and WebAssemblyWhen listing approaches, people should look at Skia Compute[0]. While it is true that traditional GPU's are not a super-great match for 2D graphics, modern GPU's are becoming more and more CPU-like, just with more parallelism. I haven't done careful quantitative evaluation of compute myself, but don't feel that any understanding of modern 2D graphics performance would be complete without that.
[0]: https://github.com/google/skia/tree/master/src/compute/skc
In Blend2D – 2D Vector Graphics EngineJust to take a look I opened the Project Zero main blog page and the newest article was on a bug in https://github.com/google/skia/ so I'm not sure I can take your comment with any ounce of credibility.
In Examining Pointer Authentication on the iPhone XSHotSort GPU accelerated integer sorting library
2 points · Open discussionSkia does not have a stable ABI, which is a requirement for inclusion in the NDK: https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/experimental/c-ap...
In Skia: an open source 2D graphics libraryI wasn't aware of the use of DirectWrite, thanks.
> On Windows, those OpenGL calls are translated to DirectX with a very sophisticated OpenGL translator called Angle (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp)
I'm aware of that. But ANGLE can't possibly be better than Direct3D; in fact, it tends to lag behind new D3D releases for obvious reasons.
> Saying that Chrome i.e. in this context Skia, doesn't use Direct2D for rendering is like saying "On Windows Chrome doesn't use native Chakra JavaScript engine".
Yet that's still a true statement. And if Chakra were technically ahead of V8, then that would be a valid criticism of Chrome's choice here.
> It makes engineering sense for Google to have their own, cross-platform, high-performance 2d rendering engine instead of a thin layer of whatever the common-denominator they could
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implement on top of 2d functionality provided by the OS.
I don't think that's clear at all. Direct2D is very good for what it is (although neither Skia nor D2D is a good API for GPUs really, as NVIDIA and others have pointed out in for example [1]). There's no architectural advantage that Skia has over D2D; they both feature very similar immediate mode APIs. D2D is being improved by Microsoft all the time, with a multi-year head start on Ganesh and the advantage of tight integration with the graphics drivers. In fact, the entire point of Alex's post is to acknowledge that Ganesh's rollout has been slower than that of CG::OGL (Apple's Ganesh equivalent, which has been shipping in stable Safari for a while) and Direct2D (which has been shipping in IE since 9 and Firefox since 4).
[1]: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/devzone/devcenter/gameg...
That's hardly accurate summary of the situation.
Chrome uses Skia, a 2D rendering library.
Skia uses Direct2D (DirectWrite) on Windows for font rendering (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/src/ports/SkTypef...)
Skia has a GPU backend that uses OpenGL where that's native.
On Windows, those OpenGL calls are translated to DirectX with a very sophisticated OpenGL translator called Angle (https://github.com/google/skia/blob/master/gyp/angle.gyp)
Therefore Chrome does use DirectX on Windows, via translation layer from OpenGL.
Saying that Chrome i.e. in this context Skia, doesn't use Direct2D for rendering is like saying "On Windows Chrome doesn't use native Chakra JavaScript engine".
Skia IS Direct2D, except it's cross-platform and being improved by Google literally every day (https://github.com/google/skia/commits/master). It makes en
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gineering sense for Google to have their own, cross-platform, high-performance 2d rendering engine instead of a thin layer of whatever the common-denominator they could implement on top of 2d functionality provided by the OS.