Using Skia on other platforms

June 29, 2009

I've been remiss in posting frequently. There's a lot going on but not a lot in tidbit form.

Here's a nice post on why we use one graphics engine on Windows and Linux and another on the Mac.

On Linux the natural thing would have been to use Cairo. We in fact do use Cairo in various bits of the UI, because it's a simple way to get pixels onto an X surface. We already depend on Cairo because GTK does. (Disclaimer: I'm a big fan of Cairo: I contributed the initial Ruby bindings and mentored the Summer of Code student who did the Haskell bindings.)

However, the question here is what to use in the WebKit port — the part that actually draws the pages. A brief Cairo vs Skia rundown for that context:

Thankfully WebKit already has a Cairo backend implementation that we'd surely be able to reuse (unless for whatever reason it's easier to do a Skia-on-Cairo port). I'm still scared of the above-mentioned subtle differences.