Everything You Need To Know About The Skia Shader Language

This video will introduce us to the Shading language and what exactly it does to elevate your windows application development. Generally, a shading language is a graphics programming language adapted to programming shader effects. This program called Shaders simply tells the computer how to render each pixel to produce photorealistic or stylized surfaces to an object or image. These shaders are written in a special shading language. Currently, there is a great number of shading languages to choose from and while they all share common features and pretty much do the same thing, they might still vary in terms of restrictions and flexibility.

What is the Skia Shader Language (SkSL)?

Whether you are developing a game or a desktop application, the use of shading language is important to make everything visually appealing as it can drastically enhance the photorealism of an object, adding depth and texture, and even creating the illusion of three-dimensionality. The most popular shading language today is the OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL). While it is a high-level shading language, the shader is made specifically for Open GL and cannot be used with Vulkan or Apple’s Metal. You can, however, use Skia’s very own Skia Shader Language (SkSL).

SkSL is a variant of GLSL which is used as Skia’s internal shading language. SkSL is, at its heart, a single standardized version of GLSL which avoids all of the various version and dialect differences found in GLSL “in the wild”, but it does bring a few of its own changes to the table. For instance, GLSL code from sites like Shadertoy can be converted to SkSL. In this video, Jim Mckeeth will demonstrate how to successfully convert a shader from Shadertoy via Skia Shaders Playground.

One of the cool things about Skia Shader Language is that it works across all platforms. It doesn’t require Open GL or any special drivers to be installed on the platform. To learn more about the Skia Shader Language, feel free to watch the video below.