Skia and flutter/impeller

[mattl...@live.com]

Hi folks, I am loving the skia life here but people are asking me about how it relates to the impeller engine used in flutter. So I thought I would ask you folks to see what the story is. I can see a few places in impeller using skia, and there is what appears to be the image and render to screen apis using skia? 

Does this make impeller a layer on top of skia? Or is there bigger plans to eventually replace skia? Android/Chrome use skia today so might not be a replacement?

[Heather Miller]

Impeller is Flutter's new renderer, built inside their team for their purposes. We continue to partner closely with them and ship Skia on some of their platforms, but where they are using Impeller, it is a replacement rather than a layer. Interestingly, the startup performance problems Impeller sought to solve are also addressed in our new GPU architecture, Graphite. Android and Chrome continue to ship Skia!

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 4:44 PM mattl...@live.com <mattl...@live.com> wrote:

Hi folks, I am loving the skia life here but people are asking me about how it relates to the impeller engine used in flutter. So I thought I would ask you folks to see what the story is. I can see a few places in impeller using skia, and there is what appears to be the image and render to screen apis using skia? 

Does this make impeller a layer on top of skia? Or is there bigger plans to eventually replace skia? Android/Chrome use skia today so might not be a replacement?

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[Mike Reed]

That is a really good reply. 

On Aug 24, 2023, at 12:07 AM, 'Heather Miller' via skia-discuss <skia-d...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/skia-discuss/CALNbQTp3XSXD-cawzv%3DbER6h1ttLtX1y3%3D6jDaaG6hNugQYe9w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Daljit]

What is the status of Graphite? I suppose it is still in an experimental stage, but is there any documentation on how to build/use it? Also, will the Ganesh backend be deprecated?

[mattl...@live.com]

Awesome! What I see here is that skia is amazing and the flutter could not handle so much power! Thanks for the reply, looking forward to keeping up with skia dev. 

[Zhuo Wang]

" Interestingly, the startup performance problems Impeller sought to solve are also addressed in our new GPU architecture " 

hi, could u explain more about this? do u mean Graphite will use static shaders as well? i.e.  Graphite won't generate shaders at runtime like before?

[Brian Osman]

Graphite does generate shaders are runtime, however:

1) It generally generates far fewer shaders than Ganesh.

2) It is designed so that you can enumerate the set of features you will use, and the library will be able to pre-compile (at startup -- and eventually ahead-of-time) all of the shaders that will be used (without needing to "record" content from an application).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/skia-discuss/6fdd99d5-3848-48fa-a69b-066129ad5820n%40googlegroups.com.

[Zhuo Wang]

thanks for reply. that sounds great.