Skia VS bgfx

If you're interested in node-compatible canvas implementations, there are several:

* 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

Yes [4].

> [1] The library is used as of 2023 in Google Chrome, ChromeOS, ChromiumOS, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Android, Firefox OS, Flutter,[5] Avalonia (from Alpha 4), LibreOffice (from version 7.0) and RAD Studio[6](since version 12.0).

> [2] Changes to the Skia repository will be rolled into Chromium by the AutoRoll bot several times per day.

> [3] It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome and ChromeOS, Android, Flutter, and many other products.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skia_Graphics_Engine

[2]: https://skia.org/docs/dev/chrome/

[3]: https://skia.org/

[4]: https://github.com/chromium/chromium/tree/main/skia

Actually, that's not entirely accurate. The lottie-web library itself doesn't support rendering to WebGL. However, there is a package called canvaskit-wasm that wraps Skia (a graphics engine) with WebAssembly (wasm). This package includes a module called skottie which supports rendering animations into a WebGL surface. However, there is a drawback with this approach: using wasm requires loading a relatively large package, and it's uncertain whether all features are supported correctly, as the official compatibility table that tracks lottie support on different platforms does not include skottie.

Skia is pretty great if you can get it running.

The imgs are mainly used by Tencent QQ and Baidu Tieba users. QQ and Tieba compress imgs by default, so the popular imgs (in China we call them "屌图" or "表情包") would be compressed million of times during the spreading, causing the super low quality. These APPs on Android are using Skia for image processing, which suffering from a legendary bug: result would be more green. The bug was fixed in 2016: https://github.com/google/skia/commit/c7d01d3e1d3621907c27b283fb7f8b6e177c629d

BGFX (https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx) uses a different approach. You basically write your shader in a GLSL-like language but it's all just (either very clever or very horrible) macro expansions that handles all the platform differences.

I previously integrated bgfx [1], which allows you to write graphics code and shaders once and supports consoles, with SDL2 stack and Swift [2]. It was quite a nice experience, especially for someone who had never worked with any of these tools before. I'm excited for SDL3 as it introduces console abstractions, eliminating the need for additional dependencies for the GPU API, especially for someone who casually experiments with graphics. Moreover, Godot officially supports the Steam Deck, and hopefully, more consoles will be supported in the future. On a related note, Miguel de Icaza is advocating for Swift adoption in Godot, and he is working on porting the editor to SwiftUI on iPad, which is quite interesting to see the progress [3].

[1] https://bkaradzic.github.io/bgfx/overview.html

[2] https://github.com/bgbernovici/myndsmith

[3] https://blog.la-terminal.net/xogot-code-editing/

I'm curious why webgpu is receiving so much attention. There have been many low-level cross-platform graphics abstractions over the years. The bgfx [1] project had its first commit ~12 years ago and it's still going! It's much more mature than webgpu. I'm guessing being W3C backed is what's propelling it?

[1] https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx

I don't use orthodox C++, but the author of this is also the author of bgfx, which is a very popular graphics api abstraction. It runs on (and has commercial products on) Android, ios, Playstation, Xbox, PC, Mac, Linux, and wasm. While the coding style might be unpopular, it has successful projects.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx

Sort of, I'd recommend a modern higher level API. I'm not sure what the current recommended ones are (probably bgfx), but assuming the wrapper is "low level enough", then the concepts you learn are still going to apply.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx for just that FOSS intermediate rendering library (includes Minecraft)

BGFX: Pretty mature and easy to use with many backends.