tiny-skia

tiny-skia is a minimal, CPU-only 2D rendering library for Rust, built as a small subset of Google’s Skia ported to native Rust. It focuses on rendering quality, speed, and small binary size, providing the common 2D operations you actually need without the enormous footprint of full Skia.

Despite being tiny, it supports filling and stroking shapes with solid colors, gradients, and patterns, plus stroke dashing, clipping, image blending, and PNG load/save. Its main use is as the rendering backend for the resvg SVG library, but it works well anywhere you need high-quality software rasterization.

What You Get

• CPU-only anti-aliased 2D rasterization ported from Skia
• Filling and stroking shapes with solid colors, gradients, and patterns
• Stroke dashing, clipping masks, and image blending
• PNG loading and saving out of the box
• SIMD acceleration and optional no-std support

Common Use Cases

• Serving as the software rendering backend for SVG rendering (resvg)
• Rasterizing vector graphics to pixel buffers or PNG images
• Generating 2D graphics on the server or CLI without a GPU
• Embedding a small, dependency-light renderer in constrained environments

Under The Hood

Architecture - tiny-skia is a Cargo workspace with the main tiny-skia crate and a tiny-skia-path member that handles path geometry. The core in src implements a scanline rasterizer, blitters, shaders (solid/gradient/pattern), and a Pixmap pixel buffer, closely following Skia’s software pipeline. Rendering flows from a Path and Paint through the rasterizer into a Pixmap you can export to PNG.

Tech Stack - Written in Rust (edition 2021) with bytemuck for zero-copy pixel handling, arrayref/arrayvec for fixed buffers, cfg-if for feature gating, and an optional png dependency for image I/O. Default features enable std, simd, and png-format, with a no-std-float path for embedded targets.

Code Quality - The repo includes an extensive tests/ suite with reference images and an integration/ folder, plus example programs (fill, stroke, gradients, patterns, masks, image compositing) and benchmarks, giving strong visual-regression coverage. A testing-tools directory and CI via GitHub Actions support ongoing quality.

API Design - The public API mirrors Skia’s familiar Pixmap, Paint, Path, and Transform types, making it approachable to anyone who has used a 2D canvas API. Documentation on docs.rs and runnable examples keep the learning curve modest, though the library intentionally excludes text rendering.