skia4delphi/skia4delphi: Skia4Delphi is a cross-platform 2D graphics API for Delphi platforms based on Google’s Skia Graphics Library. It provides a comprehensive 2D API that can be used across mobile, server and desktop models to render images.
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/10/15
This is a cool library which I missed when it was introduced while recovering from my extensive cancer treatments:
[Wayback/Archive] skia4delphi/skia4delphi: Skia4Delphi is a cross-platform 2D graphics API for Delphi platforms based on Google’s Skia Graphics Library. It provides a comprehensive 2D API that can be used across mobile, server and desktop models to render images.
Skia4Delphi is a cross-platform 2D graphics API for Delphi based on Google’s Skia graphics library.
The foundation is the cross platform Google 2D 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 API (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.
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Application
The library is used as of 2021 in Google Chrome, ChromeOS, ChromiumOS, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Android, Firefox OS, LibreOffice (from version 7.0), Flutter and Avalonia (from Alpha 4).
The Skia library is also present on the BlackBerry PlayBook, though the extent of its usage is unclear.
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
Skia is well maintained and a core of Android and Chromium so not expected to become part of the Google Graveyard.
It has it’s own extensive web-site at [Wayback/Archive] Skia
Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms. It serves as the graphics engine for Google Chrome and ChromeOS, Android, Flutter, and many other products.
Skia4Delphi
Though Skia4Delphi supports both VCL and FMX, I think the most interesting use case is as a replacement of the (still) buggy FireMonkey FMX canvas: Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero just were/are not large enough to consistently maintain high quality cross platform libraries. There are simply too many ever changing platforms to cover and the development teams have suffered too many brain drains.
This is what they cover in their main [Wayback/Archive] skia4delphi/README.md at main · skia4delphi/skia4delphi documentation too:
FMX graphics engine replacement
Using the Skia4Delphi library it is possible to override Firemonkey’s rendering engine so that it can use Skia as its default Canvas. With that, your Firemonkey application will automatically:
- Draw with antialiasing on any platform (the drawing quality is based on the Form.Quality property);
- Increase the overall graphics performance of your application by up to 50% (even drawing with higher quality);
- Resize images with better quality (also based on Form.Quality);
- Support Right-To-Left text rendering;
- Fix dozens of inconsistencies in drawings (especially in corners and strokes, such as dashes, and in texts with special emojis);
- Increase the performance of the library in general (controls, drawings, among others…).
Skia4Delphi started out literally in the midst of my recovery with two commits in August 2021:
- [Wayback/Archive] Initial commit · skia4delphi/skia4delphi@a5b7a7e: MIT license
- [Wayback/Archive] sk4d 1.0 · skia4delphi/skia4delphi@28f6d02 initial version 1.0 code: well structured (10k lines component, 4k lines API wrapper, markdown documentation, example graphics) already full cross-platform and capable of dynamically loading the underlying Skia library
The underlying Skia library [Wayback/Archive] skia4delphi/skia: Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images. is a fork of [Wayback/Archive] google/skia: Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images..
Th odd thing was that at the time of writing the fork was more than 4 months behind which was longer than than the last major [Wayback/Archive] Release 4.0.0 · skia4delphi/skia4delphi at the time of writing (you can find all of them at [Wayback/Archive] Releases · skia4delphi/skia4delphi):
- [Wayback/Archive] Comparing skia4delphi:main…google:main · skia4delphi/skia (the ~2k commits it is behind)
- [Wayback/Archive] Comparing google:main…skia4delphi:main · google/skia (the 40 commits it is ahead)
That means you are missing out a lot of bug-fixes, though you will likely have less bugs than FMX (which has far less updates: only the major and minor Delphi releases).
Via
I found Skia4Delphi while trying to get a feel what kind of Delphi libraries had appeared during the period I had cancer and was treated against it and therefore was browsing [Wayback/Archive] Fr0sT-Brutal/awesome-pascal: A curated list of awesome Delphi/FreePascal/(any)Pascal frameworks, libraries, resources, and shiny things. Inspired by awesome-… stuff. Open source and freeware only!.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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