Semantics for 2D Rasterization

Abstract

Rasterization is the process of determining the color of every pixel drawn by an application. Powerful rasterization libraries like Skia, CoreGraphics, and Direct2D put exceptional effort into drawing, blending, and rendering efficiently. Yet applications are still hindered by the inefficient sequences of instructions that they ask these libraries to perform. Even Google Chrome, a highly optimized web browser co-developed with the Skia rasterization library, still produces inefficient instruction sequences even on the top 100 most visited websites. The underlying reason for this inefficiency is that rasterization libraries have complex semantics and opaque and non-obvious execution models. To address this issue, we introduce μSkia, a formal semantics for the Skia 2D graphics library, and mechanize this semantics in Lean. μSkia covers language and graphics features like canvas state, the layer stack, blending, and color filters, and the semantics itself is split into three strata to separate concerns and enable extensibility. We then identify four patterns of sub-optimal Skia code produced by Google Chrome, and then write replacements for each pattern. μSkia allows us to verify that the replacements are correct, including identifying numerous tricky side conditions. We then develop a high-performance Skia optimizer that applies these patterns to speed up rasterization. On 139 Skia programs gathered from the top 100 websites, this optimizer yields a speedup of 1.12× over Skia's most modern GPU backend, while taking just 0.03 ms for optimization. The speedups persist across a variety of websites, Skia backends, and GPUs. To provide true, end-to-end verification, optimization traces produced by the optimizer are loaded back into the μSkia semantics and translation validated in Lean.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2026 · DOI ↗