Skia VS nanovg

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

I use nanovg for my projects and it works surprisingly well for its size. It integration is pretty simple .... if you know a little bit of OpenGL, otherwise there is a slight learning curve.

The "engine" is built on top of amazing https://www.lwjgl.org/ and https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx/, and UI system is baked by https://github.com/memononen/nanovg and https://github.com/facebook/yoga

It's a library for drawing vector shapes, sort of like SVG - https://github.com/memononen/nanovg The old way in the SDK was with GDI+, but the benefit of a vector format is scalability to higher resolutions and better GPU usage. The workaround potentially costs some frames, but its better than bust panels for now.

If you are a beginner in computer graphics, I strongly suggest you to look at the nanovg library: it contains all the primitives you might want to render (circles, lines, filled polygons, text, images, ...). Integrating it in existing codebase is not that hard, since the library is rather small.

NanoVG is the closest thing I came across when I had a similar quesiton: https://github.com/memononen/NanoVG

unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's getting steady updates now unlike the last time I checked. But I imagine it's pretty mature at this point. There also seem to be ports in Metal/DX11 if you didn't want to be stuck in OpenGL.

Also there's NanoVG if you really want a vector api in C, but don't need anti-aliased clipping.

Getting sufficient antialiasing quality for 2D graphics is difficult on GPUs. https://github.com/memononen/nanovg accomplishes this with GL2/GLES2 level hardware for most of the stuff one would want to render as part of a GUI. My project https://github.com/styluslabs/nanovgXC supports rendering arbitrary paths with exact coverage antialiasing, but requires GLES3.1 or GL4 level hardware for reasonable performance.

> to learn the 'nuts and bolts' of rendering

These nuts and bolts are very different between CPU and GPU. CPU-based libraries are painting pixels in bitmaps in system memory. Most GPU-based libraries are uploading indexed triangle meshes, and rendering them with weird shaders.

Worse, there're no good open source implementations of GPU-based ones. Microsoft ships an implementation as a part of OS (Direct2D) but it's not open source. Linux simply doesn't have an equivalent.

At least for initial versions, consider C interop with this https://github.com/memononen/nanovg It cuts a few corners (no cleartype for text, CPU overhead for repeated rendering of same static paths) but it's still good overall, simple, and easy to use.

> My only concern with C# is the cross compatibility

Works well on Linux, Windows and OSX, including ARM CPUs. Not sure about Android and iOS, never tested.

My largest concern with C# would be performance. Technically the language allows to code in any style, but most guides and examples are using OO-heavy one.