Hey people! I was looking into <Rive> and found that they don't have a compose version of the librar...

# compose-android

[Suhaib Roomy]

Hey people! I was looking into Rive and found that they don't have a compose version of the library. I looked into if I can contribute into this project to add support for composable but I found that Compose doesn't have a TextureView or a SurfaceView. In the new 1.6 version, compose now has AndroidExternalSurface which got me excited but when I looked into the implementation, its just a wrapper around the good old SurfaceView. I don't know a lot about SurfaceView so I wanted to know if anyone has an idea why the compose team went ahead with a wrapper which might introduce performance overhead because of the bridging.

[Thomas Hormes]

It seems to be on their Roadmap, though there is not a whole lot of information on the progress, or whether they have started working on compose support at all.
See this issue for more info: https://github.com/rive-app/rive-android/issues/259

[Sergey Y.]

You might think of Jetpack Compose as a fancy custom android View, that draw content using standard canvas APIs. SurfaceView in Android is a specialized view that offers direct access to a dedicated hardware buffer, allowing for efficient drawing and manipulation of graphics. It operates at a lower level than standard views like View, providing greater control over drawing and rendering processes.

Replicating SurfaceView in Compose would require a complete overhaul using OpenGL or Vulkan, bypassing the Canvas API used in Compose's drawing system.

[Sergey Y.]

That's why SurfaceView/WebView/TextureView will always be basic AndroidView wrappers in Compose.
And it is completely fine.

[romainguy]

SurfaceView and TextureView are both quite unique and can’t be replicated outside of the OS

[romainguy]

Well, you can mostly with never APIs, but this couldn’t be backported

[romainguy]

Also the “overhead” of the composables wrappers is close to irrelevant for those particular views

[romainguy]

@Sergey Y. SurfaceView has nothing to do with OpenGL/Vulkan/Canvas

[Sergey Y.]

What I mean is that the only way to create a “Compose SurfaceView” is to have ComposeView inherit from SurfaceView and implement the compose renderer using some graphics API that uses the surface provided by SurfaceView. I hope you understand what I mean.

[romainguy]

But that's not what we're discussing here

[romainguy]

And Compose could render in a SurfaceView today just fine

[Sergey Y.]

Than I lost the thread 😞
By rendering in a SurfaceView do you mean something like https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/SurfaceHolder#lockCanvas() and replace original Compose's Canvas by this?