A pure-Go GPU-accelerated 2D graphics library

[Hai Thanh Nguyen]

Looks like the only notable pure-go 2D graphics library we currently have is draw2d, we cannot be satisfied.

I want a graphics library like Skia, that is really good, something that has a usable, clean, friendly API and really support OpenGL. (draw2d has opengl port but it's mediorce and doesn't even work well)

2D graphics can be drawn with OpenGL shader, taking advantage of the GPU, being resolution-independent and hardware-accelerated. It brings serious performance improvement, not small at all (see this http://www.mdk.org.pl/2007/8/16/vector-drawing-opengl-polygon-tessellation), this is significant especially for mobile devices.

Many libraries has been moving to that path, one of the most famous, Skia, has already been ported and being used for hardware acceleration in Chrome. Jogl (Java) also implemented it (http://ramisantina.com/blog/2011/04/gpu-based-resolution-independent-font-curve-rendering-initial-release/).

The technique is really impressive and I really want to make something like that in Go, it will be a great base for projects like UI toolkit or any kind of visualization. The "how to do it" is already available, there are papers, blog posts and real code describing and implementing it, the problem is just how to understand. An impressive list of references here https://github.com/openframeworks/openFrameworks/issues/1190.

What do you think? Anyone want to help?

[bja...@gmail.com]

I'm looking for such a library as well. I've been attempting to write Skia bindings for Go, but hitting lots of resistance.
If anyone comes across anything let me know. Or if you have the expertise to get things started, I would love to contribute.

-Bryan

[Hai Thanh Nguyen]

I'm curious about what you're working on, are you trying to make a GUI library? You did exactly what I did in the past with regards to Skia, also started with wrapping Skia, wrote some functionalities on top of it with Go, dealt with all the "main thread" silliness, then I decided to make a library of my own, I did the work here https://github.com/phaikawl/gosgl. Actually I sort of abandoned the project by now. It's too much work and just not enough manpower for it.

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[Mikael Gustavsson]

If I allow myself some wishful thinking, I think a go port of https://github.com/memononen/nanovg would be a very cool thing to have.

[ajstarks]

For what it's worth, this OpenVG library [1, 2, 3], is not pure Go (it wraps the GPU-accelerated C library), but it provides a high-level 2D API for Go programs.

[1] https://github.com/ajstarks/openvg

[2] http://godoc.org/github.com/ajstarks/openvg

[3] http://mindchunk.blogspot.com/2012/09/openvg-on-raspberry-pi.html 

On Sunday, January 12, 2014 2:42:11 PM UTC-5, Hai Thanh Nguyen wrote:

[bja...@gmail.com]

I intend to build an app that has a lot of things happening on different go routines and will send it all to a single go routine that does the drawing. Obviously go's concurrency + hardware accelerated UI seem like the perfect fit. I started by picking up some opengl knowledge but I was happy to see Skia was already doing what I was looking to do.

I'm on the brink of giving up on Skia, because I can't even get a hello world example running. The way it is written makes it difficult to use even in C++. Go bindings will probably make it much worse.

I might just use draw2d just to get it out there and clean up performance later. On the other hand using shaders does sound quite appealing for the sheer performance. I might end up doing something similar to what you did. I am only going to need a few primitive shapes to get started.

-Bryan

[Hai Thanh Nguyen]

My advice is to just use nanovg (https://github.com/memononen/nanovg), it's small and it's good enough.
If you feel nanovg is not enough, you should try again to wrap Skia, after solving all the main thread silliness with Russ Cox's technique, I managed to get it to work well, no real problem anymore and could actually develop on it. Honestly my decision to write a new lib was just because Skia is too big and messy, I wanted to make some cool and new, NIH syndrome or too much Go fanboyism, mainly Go fanboyism actually.

[Bryan Austin]

Do you have your skia bindings available somewhere?

-Bryan

[Hai Thanh Nguyen]

My old project is here: https://github.com/phaikawl/Skia-Go-Renderer and https://github.com/phaikawl/gosui. I'm not sure if they've been updated to the latest code, and it's likely that they wouldn't even work (it's 8 months already, time so fast).

[a.ko...@gmail.com]

A 2025 update: Go now has its own professional graphics ecosystem, GoGPU. Readiness: Rapid Development Phase. https://github.com/gogpu.

Learn more: https://dev.to/kolkov/gogpu-a-pure-go-graphics-library-for-gpu-programming-2j5d.