skija VS JWM

I think IntelliJ was built on Swing and predates JavaFX… however, I’m curious if they’ve got plans to integrate their Skia integration work that backs desktop compose: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija

Maybe the story is not finished yet. New approaches like JetBrain's Compose (https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/lp/compose-mpp/) with a React inspired programming model might bring some new interest to the platform. Then there is a Java binding library for Skia (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija), and JavaFX is also alive and high quality.

As everyone is used to fat Electron apps now, Java applications (especially compiled and packed with new JDK features) might be refreshing.

I think it's the core, the 2D engine, just never got the love it needed to be a great place to start. Nobody seemed to prioritize making that happen.

Like, the antialiasing was noticably fuzzy. I never found an applet that looked like it belonged on the webpage. And when I built a few, it was a lot of work to even get font rendering to not be horrendous. And even then, you'd see what the browser rendered vs what the applet rendered and they were always off. I remember using images instead of font rendering sometimes.

So, if you made a swing app, it was easy to put together, but hard to make look "professional".

By the time of the Oracle acquisition, I'm pretty sure everyone just realized "the browser won" and that's why we just had JavaFX get broken off the platform and basically put out to pasture. But it's not like much went into the core platform itself to make building great UIs easy. The underlying 2D rendering just never worked efficiently.

I mean, even today, there's some serious performance issues with IntelliJ on 4k monitors with scaling. https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-526

When I look at where JetBrains is going, it sure seems like they are building on top of a better 2D engine, in this case, skia: https://github.com/JetBrains/skija.

Under the covers it uses Skija which is a java wrapper for Skia which is a C++ 2D graphics engine (https://github.com/JetBrains/skija)

You can take a look at Skija from Jetbrains. It's a wrapper around the Skia library used by Chrome, Xamarin, LibreOffice, among others.

Technically, the bot is written in Kotlin using Ktor and Koin. It's a single endpoint web service, listening for Telegram Bot API webhooks. Text is drawn using Oswald font (I need Cyrillic, not supported in Anton) with Skija library, a Java wrapper for Skia, a 2D library powering your phone and browser. It is really cool and next time you need to make something with graphics, consider using Skia and its wrapper for your language. Next, generated images are upload to Imgur via its API (the documentation could be better). The whole thing is running on a free VM in Oracle Cloud. So, yeah, next time you need to host something lightweight — check out their offering. Oracle also provides a free DB instance, which I'm using to cache the links. Monitoring: Grafana Cloud (also free). Deployments: GitHub Actions + Ansible. So it didn't cost me a penny, except for ~50 hours of coding in two weeks on the evenings.

sigh

Yeah. I am very bullish on Kotlin. Think it's probably the most exciting language evolving right now.

I went on a few-tweet minirant here about why:

https://twitter.com/GavinRayDev/status/1443279425311805440

But the tl;dr is that:

- There is Jetpack Compose currently, for Desktop, Web, and Android

- And Kotlin Native putting a large portion of resources into Skia bindings (JetBrains calls the lib "Skiko" for Kotlin Native https://github.com/JetBrains/skiko and "Skija")

It's very clear (and there are some employees which have confirmed this IIRC) that they are working on "Jetpack Compose Everywhere" that runs on iOS as well, from a single codebase.

There's the big Kotlin event going on right now, where they just announced the new WASM backend and changes in their compiler + IR commonizing/restructuring ("K2").

- https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/10/the-road-to-the-k2...

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pqz9sKXatw

The net result is that you wind up with a single language that you can use to write your backend API, your UI code (Jetpack Compose app deployed across Web/Android/iOS/Mac/Win/Linux, or transpile to JS/TS if you just want a web app, etc) and with Kotlin Native even your native, low-level code to integrate with existing C/C++ etc ecosystem.

KN already does automatic bindgen for C and Swift headers, they have direct C++ interop (like Swift does) on their future roadmap as a potential "todo".

All of this is mostly possible already -- I can do the same thing using IE Java, GraalVM, and a transpiler like Google's j2cl or bck2brwser (which is what Gluon uses for JavaFX on the web). Including the "native" part.

IE, here's a contribution I made to get GraalVM producing native binaries using Skia from the JVM + JNI Jetbrains Skia library:

https://github.com/HumbleUI/JWM/issues/158

But Kotlin is pushing the hardest to make this whole platform/stack from native <-> desktop <-> mobile <-> browser a seamless, unified experience. And you can feel it, when you try to do the "whole stack, every platform, one language" thing.

Sorry for the rant and wall of text!