Skia Canvas: Browserless implementation of the HTML Canvas drawing API for node

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windowjs.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;windowjs.org</a> 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.<p>It was my first open-source project, released about 3 years ago.<p>I had plans to also expose WebGL, audio, etc and make it a viable platform for Javascript-based games on desktop.<p>Life and other projects happened instead, and development was discontinued. Happy to see this project also making Canvas accessible outside the browser!

Out of curiosity, what&#x27;s the use for such library? If you are on a desktop surely there is a better native library to draw shapes, no?

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.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;canvaskit-wasm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;canvaskit-wasm</a>

Is this like a wrapper for the Rust crate?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rust-skia.github.io&#x2F;doc&#x2F;skia_safe&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;struct.Canvas.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rust-skia.github.io&#x2F;doc&#x2F;skia_safe&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;struct.Canv...</a>

I&#x27;ve been waiting for this for a long time. Previous attempts to do similar things required installing Node-Gyp, which was a nightmare.

Huh, it&#x27;s more than just a rendering API: &quot;can render to windows using an OS-native graphics pipeline and provides a browser-like UI event framework&quot;. They could add wgpu to get WebGPU support and ANGLE to get WebGL support.

If you&#x27;re interested in node-compatible canvas implementations:<p>- canvaskit-wasm from the skia project - I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s gpu-accelerated: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;skia&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;modules&#x2F;canvaskit&#x2F;npm_build">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;google&#x2F;skia&#x2F;tree&#x2F;main&#x2F;modules&#x2F;canvaskit&#x2F;n...</a><p>- @napi-rs&#x2F;canvas - This is the fastest binding: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Brooooooklyn&#x2F;canvas?tab=readme-ov-file#performance">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Brooooooklyn&#x2F;canvas?tab=readme-ov-file#pe...</a><p>- node-canvas - Uses Cairo instead of Skia: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Automattic&#x2F;node-canvas">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Automattic&#x2F;node-canvas</a>

I&#x27;m using this currently with Deno for Advent of Code, if I need a simple window with graphics. (There&#x27;s a window-example[1])<p>It can be added by doing &quot;deno add npm:skia-canvas&quot;, adding &quot;nodeModulesDir: auto&quot; to the deno.json, and doing a &quot;deno install --allow-scripts&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skia-canvas.org&#x2F;#rendering-to-a-window" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;skia-canvas.org&#x2F;#rendering-to-a-window</a>

Super excited to see this, it&#x27;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).<p>It&#x27;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)

I made something similar for node&#x2F;web, not so complete, but good. It can also create windows in the OS using SDL<p>Check the docs and examples<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pedroth&#x2F;tela.js">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pedroth&#x2F;tela.js</a>

Are there plans for a C API?<p>The missing C API for Skia is most likely why Cairo is still alive.

I use it in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malmal.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malmal.io</a> for rendering the drawn tiles on my server, it works really well.

Kind of strange to call it browserless as though Skia requires one to begin with. Been using the .NET Skia library in CLI and desktop applications for a while.

Would this work together with something like react-three-fiber to render 3D scenes on the server?

I wonder if this would help to render MapLibre server-side. To provide map thumbnails.

Anyone know what the difference between this and `@napi-rs&#x2F;canvas` is?<p>They seem similar?

Having skia power in nodejs is a cool idea. Thanks!

How is it different from jimp?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jimp-dev.github.io&#x2F;jimp&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jimp-dev.github.io&#x2F;jimp&#x2F;</a><p>Maybe there are some killer features?

Could this be consumed by Konva js for SSR ?

What does &quot;based on Skia&quot; actually mean?<p>Is it a fork of Skia?<p>Does it depend on Skia?<p>Did somebody look at a design diagram of Skia and redo the whole thing from scratch?<p>Did they read about Skia in a blogpost and get the gist of it?