The funny thing is that Skia is a startup in NC that was acquired more than a decade ago and turned into one of the smallest and most elusive Google engineering offices, basically just to keep Mike Reed (TrueType and TrueType GX) and his people.

The original “Skia” was the development name for QuickDraw GX[1]. (I don’t know why the Wikipedia page doesn’t say that any more.) Cary Clark, who now works at said “elusive Google engineering office”, was the mastermind behind that Skia. TrueType was a sibling project; we (QuickDraw GX team) collaborated closely with them.

Mike’s AlphaMask (sold to OpenWave) didn’t share code with the original Skia but was kind of a Skia 2, with more flexible and clearer architecture than the original. This Skia—which, again, doesn’t share code with either of its predecessors—is a kind of version 3, with a tribute name back to that original Skia.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickDraw_GX

Been one feet in the gamedev space for pretty much my whole teenage and adult life, and it's the first time I've heard about it. It might be me just not paying attention, or maybe it's not that popular for end-users.

You could use it inside your custom game engine, but it wouldn't make much sense. Most 2D games work with bitmaps and sprite-sheets and Skia gives you full vector graphics. It's huge dependency, inflates your executable by few tens of megabytes and still doesn't give you window management and input handling and so on. SDL is still the king here - it provides just enough to build upon in reliable and cross-platform fashion.

Skia would be more useful for graphical applications focused on vector graphics (diagrams, plots, layout editors, CAD...). And for general purpose 2D graphic platforms like browsers have.

I have a little 2d game that I'd like to port over to Skia. What did you end up using to handle input and audio and other gamey things?

I would think SDL would be an easy cross-platform choice there.

You might look at https://sciter.com/ Which apparently uses Cairo, Direct2D or Skia depending on the platform.

I used https://github.com/jkuhlmann/gainput for input. I never did get around to handling audio.

For the UI I used imgui. Skia actually comes with an imgui backend (it's used for the Viewer tool) that is easy enough to hack into whatever you need.

Nice but got "Failed to run, possibly violated security container"

The little server that runs fiddle.skia.org is probably overloaded.

Not sure where it is popular.

Even I rather use SDL, written in C, than having to deal with getting to compile Skia across my platforms.

Then there is Cocos2d-x, SFML and OpenFrameworks as well.

How many Android devices are out there right now? They've all been using Skia since day one.

It is not exposed to native code.

What's realtime perf like?