Open Source Rust Graphics Software for Mobile Operating Systems

Forma is an experimental vector graphics renderer written in Rust, developed by Google to explore high-performance, parallelized rendering techniques across multiple platforms. The project aims to achieve portability, performance, simplicity, and small footprint through a streamlined four-stage rendering pipeline. Forma provides both CPU (software) and GPU (hardware) backends, relying on Rust’s SIMD auto-vectorization, Rayon for multithreading, and WebGPU (wgpu) for hardware acceleration. The renderer processes Bézier curves, line segments, and pixels through stages of flattening, rasterization, sorting, and painting, updating only changed tiles for efficiency. This design allows Forma to render complex vector scenes—such as large-scale SVGs—at interactive frame rates even on CPUs.