Skia Cross-Platform Graphics Library (iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, and Linux)

I've wanted to try using Skia for rendering on desktop apps for a while now, but typography has been the thing to stop me. With Direct2D + DirectWrite, you get a very clear, complete, and reasonably integrated stack for all your vector rendering needs. With Skia, however, my understanding is that you have to defer to system APIs like DirectWrite for certain tasks, or pop cross platform frameworks like Harfbuzz on top (along with a layout engine and whatever else you might need for international text). Either way, these integrations are often poorly documented.

It's a shame that typography in desktop apps is such a hard thing to find resources on, especially if you want to limit platform-specific code. There's that wonderfully informative 'State of Text Rendering' article, but it's so many years out of date, that it's hard to tell what is still relevant and accurate.

This is also what Google's new Flutter project uses to build cross-platform apps.

I'm a little surprised that Firefox is using this library. Don't they often try to avoid sharing important code with Chrome?

(Not that there's anything particularly wrong with it, but imagine the outcry if Firefox started using V8?)

Such a shame they removed all the docs about porting to new platforms long ago.

Would be a lot better with a stable C API. I know they've been working on it but I can't find anything relevant on their website (which is pretty bad for prospective users to begin with).