LibreOffice On Windows Will Now Hard Require Clang For Performance Reasons

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LibreOffice On Windows Will Now Hard Require Clang For Performance Reasons

Last month we reported on LibreOffice now preferring its new rendering code be built with LLVM Clang over alternative compilers. When falling back to CPU-based software rasterization, the Clang-generated code performs much better than alternative compilers given Google's own emphasis with Skia on being Clang-focused. LibreOffice 7.0 is now beginning a hard requirement on Clang when building for Windows...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Needs-Windows-Clang

[mos87]

When a spreadsheet/document maker requires advanced hw acceleration. And still looks and sometimes behaves ugly.
Just how many layers and frameworks are there lol

[Azrael5]

Is it not better GPu-based raterization?

[Michael]

Is it not better GPu-based raterization?

As outlined in the article, not all drivers/hardware have working Vulkan support for Skia.

[Azrael5]

As outlined in the article, not all drivers/hardware have working Vulkan support for Skia.

a solution applied by chrome program would be useful. chrome selects what is hardware accelerated by what is not hardware accelerated.

[Almindor]

When a spreadsheet/document maker requires advanced hw acceleration. And still looks and sometimes behaves ugly.
Just how many layers and frameworks are there lol

Yup, many. A nice example of collecting flowers by dynamite.

[ssokolow]

Skia could be a nice alternative to other famous today's quasi-free toolkit. But still not completely free (from big companies).

Skia is not a widget toolkit, it's a 2D rendering/rasterization library like Cairo (which GTK uses and Firefox was still using last time I looked into it), Anti-Grain Geometry, Direct2D, or the backends of the QPainter component of Qt which don't delegate to something like Direct2D.

[Linuxhippy]

I am so glad the new skia backend will replace LOs self-written OpenGL rendering layer - it was the source of so many problems, and still sometimes showed *horrible* performance in many not-so-corner cases.

Doing 2D with 3D hardware is hard and best left to developers experienced in / dedicated to this area.

[nranger]

Skia is not a widget toolkit, it's a 2D rendering/rasterization library like Cairo (which GTK uses and Firefox was still using last time I looked into it)...

Firefox now defaults to Skia (check about:support in any recent build).

[quikee]

Just for the info: GCC doesn't show the same performance regression as MSVC compiler, so on Linux or any other platform, Clang won't be forced when Skia is enabled. MSVC is a fast compiler, but doesn't optimize the code as much. Skia developers mainly develop the library for Chromium, which always compiles with Clang on Windows, so performance regressions like this just aren't addressed.