dcjones / skia.jl Goto Github PK

Ping @timholy. This may interest you.

This repo is a little experiment I just did to see if skia could get us better drawing performance than cairo. Skia was developed for chrome. Firefox was using cairo but switched to skia, I think for performance reasons.

I did a little benchmark (in src/bench.jl) drawing 1e6 randomly placed circles, and the times are promising:

Skia: elapsed time: 1.74048119 seconds (43 kB allocated)
Cairo: elapsed time: 6.268057011 seconds (2 kB allocated)

It wouldn't be hard to write a Compose backend for Skia and get significantly better performance on large plots. However major caveats:

• Skia does not have a package in most repositories (e.g. homebrew, debian, etc).
• It's intended to be statically linked to C++ programs. It took me a little tinkering to get a usable shared library.
• The ABI is not stable, and the API is only semi-stable.
• The C API is very incomplete and not intended as more than a toy. E.g. I had to add a draw circle function because they had only bothered with oval. Skia also has some fancy GPU backends but none of that is exposed in the C API.

So if we were to make this a practical library we would be forced to 1. maintain our own C bindings, 2. build and distribute our own binaries for the library. Maybe that's worth it, I'm not sure yet.