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Comment by raphlinus | Hacker News Reader

For xi-editor I considered Skia but ultimately decided to write my own OpenGL renderer. I think Skia would have worked, but the dependency was heavyweight and I'm able to tweak my renderer (for example, it gets linear-sRGB color blending right, while Skia uses an approximation). I have a draft blog post on this in the queue, but juggling just a few too many things at the moment.

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Isn't skia able to call OpenGL too? Do you think your own thing will be lighter weight in the end? Which parts of skia do you think you won't need? (For sRGB, a patch for skia might be less work than a full new 2d library. Also depends on if your goal is to write fun code or to get a product out, of course.)

It all depends how you count. I consider the total cost of adopting a dependency the size of Skia to be quite a bit more than the lines of code written; I would have had to write _some_ code to do the interfacing. Then there's the question of source code download size and clean build times, which would have both gone up by more than an order of magnitude.

When leading an Android platform team several years ago, we enable the OpenGL backend to Skia to see if it would accelerate general UI rendering.

The conclusion was after a whole bunch of bug fixes (OpenGL ES 2.0 IIRC), it ran but (a) ate up a lot of GPU memory (b) was slower than the 2D rendering for 80% of the drawing operations (c) some rendering ops (such as the font wide) could not be easily accelerated, meaning you would need to flush the GPU partially rendered frame periodically, then bring into the CPU cache, draw over and then flush again before writing more GPU operations.

Fun experiment - poor outcome!

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