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silvajoao
njtransit
That’s pretty cool! But v8 alone kind of sucks unless you specifically want isolation. Sometimes you just want to make a network request, you know?
silvajoao
That makes total sense in many applications, including games.
The idea was to have TCP sockets and Websockets to enable that.
Basically, have the same APIs you're familiar with in a Browser, but in a much smaller package that you can ship independently of the Browser.
(this is very similar to Electron)
xnorswap
> Sometimes you just want to make a network request
In a drawing tool / library?
That's just asking for trouble. By spec, SVG allows for XXE shenanigans. I'd rather not worry that any image file I process might exfiltrate my data.
wis
Amazing project!
> but also embeds v8 for a very small runtime instead of using Node.
By how much does embedding just V8 instead of using Node.js decrease the binary size? Node.js uses V8, does most of Node's binary size come from its runtime and not V8?
I tried browsing the website and GitHub repo to find how many kBs or MBs typically is a Window.js binary, but didn't find an answer.
silvajoao
See the binary sizes in the (obsolete) releases page:
https://github.com/windowjs/windowjs/releases
About 8 MiB in the end. Note that these builds have a binary trimmed by UPX.
wis
Wow, 8 MiB, that's impressively small IMO. I expected a program that embeds V8 (let alone also having windowing and Skia) to have a binary size much bigger. something closer to Node's or Deno's binary size 40MiB+.
Using the Window.js approach of embedding V8, instead of using a windowing library + a Skia Canvas library in Node.js ─really makes sense if you would like to keep the binary size minimally small and only pay for the libraries/modules you actually pull in and use, instead of having them statically linked in the binary by default. For example, an offline app/game that doesn't use the network doesn't need to have a "net" or "http" module in the binary. These may be bad examples though, I don't know how much do those Node runtime modules constitute out of the final Node binary, it may be an insignificant fraction.
h1fra
Out of curiosity, what's the use for such library? If you are on a desktop surely there is a better native library to draw shapes, no?
adrianh
At Soundslice, we have a custom sheet-music-rendering graphics library in frontend JavaScript/Canvas.
We also need to generate vector PDFs serverside — so we use a node library that speaks the HTML Canvas API and can generate PDFs. This way the result is exactly the same as the rendered sheet music in the web browser. Nice!
The upshot is: this kind of library allows for code reuse in non-browser contexts.
rafaelmn
Is Canvas really suitable for PDFs ? Afaik it's immediate mode bitmap graphics - so PDFs would just be embedded bitmaps ?
adrianh
We do indeed generate vector PDFs, not embedded bitmaps.
Our graphics engine works with Canvas API instructions — like "draw a line from point (A,B) to (C,D)." This API is small enough and low-level enough that it can also generate pristine vector output.
That's in fact one of the features of Skia Canvas (vector output in PDF and SVG).
DanielHB
On a related note, I once used puppeteer and headless chrome in a docker image to generate PDF manuals from our web page documentation using the print to PDF feature of headless chrome.
I am not sure if it would be viable to use for thousands of PDF generation per minute but it worked great. I wasted a lot of time trying to find a good lib for HTML->PDF and they all kinda sucked in different ways. The only downside is that the chrome PDF api doesn't have a way to generate a table of contents with page numbers.
dizhn
I have a soundslice account that I use infrequently. It's pretty nice. Thanks for building it and making it available.
Gabriel_Martin
When you mentioned Soundslice I recognized your name :) Your recording of Django's Tiger is what got me into Jazz. Small world!
simonsarris
Curious: What other libs are you using for the PDF generation?
epcoa
There isn’t really anything commonly “native” as powerful as skia for 2D drawing and a big part of skia is using the native graphics effectively, this is why it exists in the first place for browser engines. Besides having one target API is a benefit.
1propionyl
> There isn’t really anything commonly “native” as powerful as skia for 2D drawing
Cairo?
epcoa
I love Cairo, but it’s just not in the same feature or performance ballpark as skia. There’s a reason even Firefox adopted skia. Skia is like the V8 of 2D drawing libraries, just a ton of continual investment into optimization. I used to work on cairo and pixman, it’s great, very straightforward but not finely tuned for performance on modern hardware.
pjmlp
Direct2D, CoreGraphics,...
epcoa
In addition to the portability issue, CoreGraphics does not compete directly with Skia or Direct2D for that matter (it’s mostly CPU based). If you combine it with CoreAnimation you get something of a quasi superset. Direct2D is +/-, but it also doesn’t have some higher level features like PDF and SVG backends, and it doesn’t have the software rendering capabilities of skia by design.
Of course there are 2D drawing libraries on the major platforms (and CoreGraphics and Direct2D are very different, there’s also GDI+), but it was a weird question to start: what’s the use of a portable library. But furthermore, skia is not just a portability wrapper.
nox101
It's portable? What other GPU accelerated 2D rendering library is?
One the one hand this is lower-level. On the other hand, I've used puppeteer as my 2D graphics library. I get Canvas 2D, and WebGL, and WebGPU, and all of HTML/CSS (so Text with effects, background images, CSS transforms, etc). I get image and video loading. I can then use the screenshot functionality to make an image of whatever I put together. It's overkill, but for my use case I don't care. It works, it's cross platform, it solves my problem.
jeffbee
I'd be surprised if you could point out a platform that has better APIs for drawing 2D graphics than Canvas offers. Skia outperforms Direct2D by a little bit and outperforms Cairo by a lot. It is optimized to a high degree and has GPU-accelerated backends.
afavour
Being able to run the same code on multiple platforms is a big bonus. It’s also a very common 2D drawing API. iOS has a native version, Android has a native version, all with more or less the same drawing operations. Leveraging them can pay dividends.
qwertox
Server-side rendering of a track onto map tiles, enriched with other information like PoIs, distance marks, colorizing the track according to the speed, and so on, in order to then send it as a summary email to the customer.
Skia is the most modern library if you want to render shapes onto an image/surface.
According to the example `import {Window} from 'skia-canvas'` you can also use it to draw onto a spawned window on a desktop.
senko
I used it (different lib, same purpose) at a previous startup, shared web whiteboard, to save the whiteboard to pdf/image.
We had a rendering engine backed by canvas, so it was easy to just redirect it to this to get the file output. (not everything was visible on the user's screen all the time so couldn't just save from the client)
colordrops
Seems you could compile desktop apps to Web Assembly and distribute them without using some monstrosity like Electron.
jahewson
Skia ships with a WASM build that supports node, called CanvasKit [1], whereas this module is Rust bindings? I’d be keen to know what the pros and cons of each approach are.
TheRealPomax
Note that it's not so much "rust bindings" as a pre-compiled node binary (that happens to be generated off of a mixed Rust/C++ codebase). So that's really the main difference: WASM needs a separate runtime, whereas a node binary doesn't.
steelbrain
> WASM needs a separate runtime, whereas a node binary doesn't.
FWIW, node ships with a WASM runtime. See https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/nodejs-with-weba...
maxloh
The more accurate way to say that is: V8 is also a WASM runtime.
brabel
Is this like a wrapper for the Rust crate?
https://rust-skia.github.io/doc/skia_safe/canvas/struct.Canv...
wslh
I understand that a Skia Canvas should work with almost any programming language with just bindings [1]. I don't see anything in particular with Node.
jacobp100
Looks like it
zxilly
yes, generated by napi-rs
Feathercrown
I've been waiting for this for a long time. Previous attempts to do similar things required installing Node-Gyp, which was a nightmare.
modeless
Huh, it's more than just a rendering API: "can render to windows using an OS-native graphics pipeline and provides a browser-like UI event framework". They could add wgpu to get WebGPU support and ANGLE to get WebGL support.
genter
Skia is a widely used library (off the top of my head, Chrome, Firefox, and LibreOffice use it) that supports lots of rendering targets, including WebGPU and ANGLE.
modeless
I don't mean WebGPU and WebGL as Skia backends. I mean WebGPU and WebGL as APIs that this library could expose to users in addition to the HTML canvas API.
dekhn
That's very similar to what Qt already provides (QPainter, for raw image/windows, more sophisticated widgets with event support. Further- and this is something I've been looking for a while- they have a graphicsview that allows resolution-independent rendering of millions of objects, with events, in an larger-than-window graphics plane.
kevlened
If you're interested in node-compatible canvas implementations:
- 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
citeguised
I'm using this currently with Deno for Advent of Code, if I need a simple window with graphics. (There's a window-example[1])
It can be added by doing "deno add npm:skia-canvas", adding "nodeModulesDir: auto" to the deno.json, and doing a "deno install --allow-scripts".
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TheRealPomax
Super excited to see this, it'll make writing web-compatible graphics that can also run standalone so much nicer (and without needing a compile things from source using a second scripting language to generate the code needed to compile the library for the first scripting language).
It'll also be interesting to see how well this slots into things like VS Code for live-rendering canvas code (or code that has a translation layer for running on a web canvas)
pedroth
I made something similar for node/web, not so complete, but good. It can also create windows in the OS using SDL
Check the docs and examples
soegaard
Are there plans for a C API?
The missing C API for Skia is most likely why Cairo is still alive.
loic-sharma
Impeller - Flutter’s rendering library that replaces Skia on iOS and Android - is working on a C API: https://github.com/flutter/engine/blob/main/impeller/toolkit...
hwc
I did a little work on a C API for Skia a long time ago. We didn't have a good use case at the time, so the project was dropped.
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https://windowjs.org is a very similar concept -- it wraps Skia and exposes it as the Canvas API, but also embeds v8 for a very small runtime instead of using Node.
It was my first open-source project, released about 3 years ago.
I had plans to also expose WebGL, audio, etc and make it a viable platform for Javascript-based games on desktop.
Life and other projects happened instead, and development was discontinued. Happy to see this project also making Canvas accessible outside the browser!