Hardware accelerated drawing for SWT with Skia

"Hardware accelerated drawing for SWT with Skia," presented by Denis Ungemach from SAP SE, explores how integrating the Skia graphics library into SWT enables hardware-accelerated rendering and improved performance across platforms. This session was recorded at Open Community Experience 2026 (OCX26) in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the OC for Tooling.

This session examines how the SWT widget toolkit can be modernised by integrating Skia, a cross-platform 2D graphics library, to improve rendering performance and enable hardware acceleration.

The talk begins by outlining limitations in the current SWT graphics model, which relies on platform-specific implementations such as GDI on Windows, Quartz on macOS, and Cairo on Linux. These implementations are primarily CPU-driven and introduce complexity in maintenance and limitations in performance and scalability.

The session introduces Skia as an alternative rendering engine, highlighting its ability to leverage GPU acceleration and provide a consistent graphics layer across platforms. It explains how Skia can be integrated into SWT using Java bindings, enabling developers to switch between the traditional graphics context and the Skia-based implementation with minimal code changes.

A key focus is on the integration architecture. The implementation extends the existing SWT graphics context through a delegation mechanism, allowing drawing operations to be redirected to a Skia-backed rendering pipeline. This approach preserves compatibility with existing SWT applications while enabling incremental adoption of the new rendering engine.

The session demonstrates performance improvements achieved through GPU acceleration, showing significant increases in frame rates for rendering-intensive scenarios. It also highlights improvements in rendering precision, including support for floating-point calculations and more accurate scaling.

The talk also discusses current limitations, including incomplete support for text rendering, image handling complexities, and differences in font resolution between platforms. It outlines challenges related to API constraints, legacy compatibility, and the need for further development to support broader use cases.

Finally, the session explores potential future directions, including extending the approach to browser-based rendering through serialisation of drawing commands and integration with web technologies.

Key topics covered
- SWT graphics architecture and limitations
- integration of Skia as a rendering engine
- GPU acceleration for 2D graphics
- cross-platform rendering consistency
- delegation-based graphics context extension
- performance improvements in rendering workloads
- precision scaling and floating-point rendering
- limitations in text, fonts and image handling
- potential for browser-based rendering integration

Why this matters
Legacy desktop frameworks still power many applications, but their rendering models can limit performance and scalability. This session shows how modern graphics libraries can be integrated into existing toolkits to improve performance while preserving compatibility with existing codebases.

About OCX26
Open Community Experience 2026 is the Eclipse Foundation’s flagship event, held in Brussels, Belgium. It brings together developers, architects, and industry leaders to explore open source technologies across domains including IoT, AI, automotive, and security, with a focus on practical implementation and collaboration. Learn more at https://www.ocxconf.org/

Chapters
00:00 introduction to SWT and motivation
02:13 limitations of existing SWT graphics
03:36 introducing Skia and graphics capabilities
05:28 Skia integration approach and Java bindings
07:03 comparison with platform-specific implementations
08:46 switching between rendering engines
11:41 performance comparison and benchmarks
18:52 GPU acceleration and frame rate improvements
21:35 architecture and delegation model
24:37 current limitations and missing features
30:29 potential browser integration approach

Видео Hardware accelerated drawing for SWT with Skia канала Open Community Experience