Xamarin Release SkiaSharp for Cross Platform High Performance 2D Graphics

 

Today Xamarin announced the release of SkiaSharp, available now on Github.  SkiaSharp is based on Google’s Skia library.  The library was released under the MIT source license.

 

From the release:

Today we’re launching SkiaSharp, a cross-platform, high-performance 2D API for .NET developers available across mobile, desktops, and servers.

SkiaSharp provides a powerful C# API for doing 2D graphics powered by Google’s Skia library, the same library that powers Google Chrome, Firefox, and Android’s graphic stacks.

SkiaSharp ships conveniently as a cross-platform NuGet package, and supports the following platforms out of the box: MacOS X, Android and iOS with Mono, and the Windows Desktop with .NET. As NuGet evolves, we’ll offer this for .NET Core and assorted Linux distributions (In the meantime, if you need it now, you can build SkiaSharp yourself).

Why We Chose Skia

While Mono has supported System.Drawing for a while, and we built a CoreGraphics-powered version for Mac/iOS, it has never been a pixel-perfect match for the original .NET implementation of System.Drawing. Mono.Cairo is also generally available, but has some limitations that are difficult to work around.

Skia gives us the same graphics output across all platforms, is actively maintained, and offers great features not found elsewhere, like filters and hardware accelerated graphics.

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