Skia Graphics Engine

The Skia Graphics Engine or Skia is an open-source 2D graphics library written in C++. Skia abstracts away platform-specific graphics APIs (which differ from one to another). Skia Inc. originally developed the library; Google acquired it in 2005, and then released the software as open source licensed under the New BSD free software license in 2008.

Overview
In order to stay multi-platform, Skia supports several (platform-dependent) back-ends. These include:


 * CPU software rasterization
 * Portable Document Format (PDF) output
 * GPU-accelerated rendering by using:
 * ANGLE backed, which translates OpenGL ES calls into vendor's native APIs
 * Vulkan, and Metal.
 * Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
 * XML Paper Specification (XPS)

Skia is most similar in purpose to Cairo or Pathfinder (meaning that it focuses on drawing) rather than to other more elaborate APIs like that one of Qt that provide their own widgets and UI description language etc.

Application
The library is used in Google Chrome, ChromeOS, ChromiumOS, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Android, Firefox OS, Flutter, Avalonia (from Alpha 4),  LibreOffice (from version 7.0) and RAD Studio (since version 12.0).

Supported platforms

 * Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10
 * macOS 10.10.5 or later
 * iOS 8 or later
 * Android 4.1 (JellyBean) or later
 * Ubuntu 14.04+, Debian 8+, openSUSE 13.3+, or Fedora Linux 24+
 * Web Browsers

Etymology
Skia is a romanisation of the word 'shadow' in Greek (Σκιά).

History
Skia Inc, developers of the Skia Graphics Engine, was founded in 2004 by Mike Reed and Cary Clark in Chapel Hill North Carolina, before being acquired by Google in 2005.

YouTube

 * Google Developers: Painting in Chromium, 2012 on YouTube
 * Google Developers: Painting in Chromium, 2012 on YouTube