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Impeller: Elevating Flutter Performance with Predictable Rendering

In the world of Flutter, Impeller is a buzzword that has caught the attention of developers and enthusiasts alike. But what exactly is Impeller, and why is it crucial for Flutter apps? Let’s dive into the details.

What is Impeller?

Impeller is a new rendering engine for flutter. Now, many of you can think. What is a rendering engine. Rendering engine is nothing but a piece of software responsible for converting input instructions or data into visual or audible output. Basically, it helps us to draw UI of an app according to the instruction you give it. Flutter engine is written is C/C++language. Which is the part of dart UI. Rendering engine in Flutter orchestrates the transformation from widget tree to pixels on the screen. Before Impeller flutter used skia as a default graphics engine. But, there was some issues on it.

Challenges with Skia:

Skia has been the graphic engine for Flutter since its inception. Skia is also a powerful render engine, which powers various platforms, including Chrome, Firefox, Android, and ChromeOS. However, Skia wasn’t custom-built specifically for Flutter. For this reason, there many issues with flutter app. Like,  

  • Performance: Early-onset jank (stuttering or frame drops) was a common issue.
  • Platform-Specific Limitations: Skia didn’t fully leverage modern hardware-accelerated graphics APIs like Metal on iOS and Vulkan on Android.
  • Lack of Instrumentation: Skia lacked comprehensive instrumentation for capturing and analyzing graphics resources. 

What's new in Impeller? 

Impeller solved many problem of Skia. Also, it is customly build for flutter, which can take advantage of modern graphics APIs like Metal or Vulkan. For this, developer can improve the performance of their flutter app. There are many advantage of Impeller. Like,

  • Predictable performance: Impeller compiles all shaders and reflection offline at build time. It builds all pipeline state objects upfront. The engine controls caching and caches explicitly.
  • Instrumentable: Impeller tags and labels all graphics resources, such as textures and buffers. It can capture and persist animations to disk without affecting per-frame rendering performance.
  • Portable: Flutter doesn't tie Impeller to a specific client-rendering API. You can author shaders once and convert them to backend-specific formats, as necessary.
  • Leverages concurrency: Impeller can distribute single-frame workloads across multiple threads, if necessary.

Flutter enables Impeller on android and ios by default. But for legacy devices that don't support Vulkan, Impeller will fallback to the the legacy OpenGL renderer. If you want to disable the Impeller you can do it. For this, checkout the Impeller documentation.

For Flutter developer across the world, the creation of Impeller is a significant update in Flutter framework. Which will help a developer to improve the Flutter apps, by enhancing app quality.

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