Replacing react-native's Image with react-native-skia's one, is it a good or bad idea?

[bglgwyng]

I'm considering writing something like 'react-native-fast-image' to replace Image from 'react-naitve' with this library.
The motivation is that currently, we can't render an image from a blob with Image from 'react-native' or even FastImage from 'react-native-fast-image'. We should make a URI and pass it to these components. It prevents us from fine control over the image resource loading on the JS side.

I think that it can be achieved with react-native-skia.
I found that Skia's internal function Skia.Data.fromBytes that can be used to create a Skia.Data from a blob. And Image from 'react-native-skia' can be used to render an image from a Skia.Data.
I also like the fact that I can use various effects on images in this way.

However, I'm so worried about the performance of this idea. I barely know anything about the internals of Skia. So I'm not sure if this idea is good or bad.

I'll use the new component for image rendering all over my application.
My application includes a camera roll, so there would be rendered about a hundred of the new image component on the view at the same time.
This discussion tells that it's ok to use large numbers of Canvas at the same time, but it would be nice if someone convinces me that using Canvas for each image is also ok.

In short, is the composition of Canvas + Image + Skia.Data.fromByes suitable to replace Image or FastImage? Is there any issue that I should take into account?

I'll start to write a PoC of this idea now and let you know what happens.

[wcandillon]

That's an interesting question. The short answer is that it's definitely worth trying but you might run into issues. There are some open questions there since we are not deep into this topic at the moment.

You can build an image component with Skia. Using our declarative (UI Thread rendering API).
Some customisations or the image loading logic may rely on the JS thread however.
This may change in the future however.

Skia might be a great library to prototype an amazing image component that is perfectly consistent between iOS and Android.
To make it work perfectly work on the field, we expect some extra work to be needed.