linebender/vello

A GPU compute-centric 2D renderer

Vello is a 2D graphics rendering engine written in Rust, with a focus on GPU compute. It can draw large 2D scenes with interactive or near-interactive performance, using [wgpu] for GPU access.

It is used as the rendering backend for Xilem, a Rust GUI toolkit.

Significant changes are documented in the changelog.

Vello is meant to fill the same place in the graphics stack as other vector graphics renderers like Skia, Cairo, and its predecessor project Piet. On a basic level, that means it provides tools to render shapes, images, gradients, text, etc, using a PostScript-inspired API, the same that powers SVG files and the browser <canvas> element.

Vello's selling point is that it gets better performance than other renderers by better leveraging the GPU. In traditional PostScript-style renderers, some steps of the render process like sorting and clipping either need to be handled in the CPU or done through the use of intermediary textures. Vello avoids this by using prefix-sum algorithms to parallelize work that usually needs to happen in sequence, so that work can be offloaded to the GPU with minimal use of temporary buffers.

This means that Vello needs a GPU with support for compute shaders to run.