LibreOffice Git Lands Its Skia Drawing Code - Leading To Vulkan-Accelerated Office Suite

With LibreOffice 6.4 branched ahead of its release next year, feature development is open on what will be the next follow-on release for later in 2020. And this week one big underlying code change was merged... Using Skia for drawing the interface in an effort to ultimately replace the Cairo usage.

The Skia graphics library is what has been in development by Google for well over a decade and is used by the Chrome web browser, Chrome OS, and other projects. Skia supports CPU-based rasterization as well as GPU acceleration via OpenGL and other APIs. Skia excitingly also has a Vulkan GPU back-end too. Skia sees much more development by Google and others compared to Cairo that has rather stagnated in recent years. Those unfamiliar with Skia and wanting to learn more can do so via Skia.org.

Merged this week to LibreOffice Git master (not the 6.4 branch) is the initial Skia drawing code for rendering the user-interface using this Google-led library.

The 100+ commits doing the initial Skia bring-up within LibreOffice can be found here. This is super exciting and will hopefully yield a speedier / more responsive UI once complete.

Skia can still be disabled at build and run-time if desired for comparison. The Skia Vulkan back-end is the default on supported platforms for LibreOffice VCL drawing purposes. Details on some of the run-time Skia tunables via this documentation.