Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name DirectX was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a gaming console, the X was used as the basis of the name Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The X initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite.
A computing platform, digital platform, or software platform is an environment in which software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system (OS), a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed using the services provided by the platform. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage on which computer programs can run.
Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering, W-buffering, stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, texture blending, clipping, culling, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties.
Direct3D and OpenGL are both application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used in applications to render 2D and 3D computer graphics. As of 2005, graphics processing units (GPUs) almost always implement one version of both of these APIs. Examples include: DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2 circa 2004; DirectX 10 and OpenGL 3 circa 2008; DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 circa 2011; and most recently, DirectX 12 circa 2018. GPUs that support more recent versions of the standards are backwards compatible with applications that use the older standards; for example, one can run older DirectX 9 games on a more recent DirectX 11-certified GPU.
In computing, D3DX is a high level API library which is written to supplement Microsoft's Direct3D graphics API. The D3DX library was introduced in Direct3D 7, and subsequently was improved in Direct3D 9. It provides classes for common calculations on vectors, matrices and colors, calculating look-at and projection matrices, spline interpolations, and several more complicated tasks, such as compiling or assembling shaders used for 3D graphic programming, compressed skeletal animation storage and matrix stacks. There are several functions that provide complex operations over 3D meshes like tangent-space computation, mesh simplification, precomputed radiance transfer, optimizing for vertex cache friendliness and strip reordering, and generators for 3D text meshes. 2D features include classes for drawing screen-space lines, text and sprite based particle systems. Spatial functions include various intersection routines, conversion from/to barycentric coordinates and bounding box and sphere generators.
Vulkan is a low-level, low-overhead cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and operating systems, it is also designed to work with modern multi-core CPUs.
HarmonyOS (HMOS) is a distributed operating system developed by Huawei for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, smart watches, personal computers and other smart devices. It has a single real-time microkernel design in kernel mode with a single framework: the operating system derives from HarmonyOS NEXT, based on OpenHarmony operating system family that is the user mode of HarmonyOS NEXT system that takes full L0-L2 source code derived from LiteOS roots that selects suitable kernels from the kernel abstraction layer. The operating system was officially launched by Huawei in August 2019.
Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) is a collection of proprietary services and high level application programming interfaces (APIs) developed by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Its hub known as HMS Core serves as a toolkit for app development on Huawei devices. HMS is typically installed on Huawei devices on top of running dual-framework HarmonyOS operating system, and on its earlier devices running the Android operating system with EMUI including devices already distributed with Google Mobile Services. Alongside, HMS Core Wear Engine for Android phones with lightweight based LiteOS wearable middleware app framework integration connectivity like notifications, status etc.
DevEco Studio is the official integrated development environment (IDE) for Huawei's HarmonyOS operating system, built on JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA software and Huawei's SmartAssist designed specifically for HarmonyOS development. It is available for download on Microsoft Windows and macOS based operating systems.
The version history of the HarmonyOS distributed operating system began with the public release of the HarmonyOS 1.0 for Honor Vision smart TVs on August 9, 2019. The first expanded commercial version of the Embedded, IoT AI, Edge computing based operating system, HarmonyOS 2.0, was released on June 2, 2021, for phones, tablets, smartwatches, smart speakers, routers, and internet of things. Beforehand, DevEco Studio, the HarmonyOS app development IDE, was released in September 2020 together with the HarmonyOS 2.0 Beta. HarmonyOS is developed by Huawei. New major releases are announced at the Huawei Developers Conference (HDC) in the fourth quarter of each year together with the first public beta version of the operating system's next major version. The next major stable version is then released in the third to fourth quarter of the following year.
OpenAtom OpenHarmony, or abbreviated as OpenHarmony (OHOS), is a family of open-source distributed operating systems based on HarmonyOS derived from LiteOS, donated the L0-L2 branch source code by Huawei to the OpenAtom Foundation. Similar to HarmonyOS, the open-source distributed operating system is designed with a layered architecture, which consists of four layers from the bottom to the top, i.e., the kernel layer, system service layer, framework layer, and application layer. It is also an extensive collection of free software, which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems via Kernel Abstraction Layer subsystems.
The HarmonyOS App Pack or the App file, identified with the file extension ".app", serves as the file format used by the HarmonyOS operating system. It functions as a native HarmonyOS app for distribution and installation through Huawei AppGallery, or for distribution through Huawei Ability Gallery in respect of installation-free apps under both former classic dual-framework and current HarmonyOS NEXT system of unified OpenHarmony app framework. The App file is also used by a number of other open source HarmonyOS-based operating systems such as OpenHarmony and Oniro OS-based operating systems for distribution and installation of applications, video games and middleware. Including non OpenHarmony-based operating systems, such as GNU Linux-based Unity Operating System that supports the app file format.
HarmonyOS NEXT is a proprietary distributed operating system and an iteration of HarmonyOS, developed by Huawei to support only HarmonyOS native apps. The operating system base is primarily aimed at software and hardware developers that deal directly with Huawei. It does not include Android's AOSP core and is incompatible with Android applications.
ArkGraphics 3D is an open source, open standard low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API developed by Huawei as a subset of Ark Engine for HarmonyOS and OpenAtom OpenHarmony. It is compared to low-level APIs on other platforms such as Apple Metal, Vulkan and DirectX 12.
ArkUI is a declarative based user interface framework for building user interfaces on native HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony alongside Oniro OS applications developed by Huawei for the ArkTS and Cangjie programming language.
Ark Compiler, also known as ArkCompiler, is a unified compilation and runtime platform that supports joint compilation and running across programming languages and chip platforms, also operating systems of open-source OpenHarmony, Oniro OS, alongside proprietary HarmonyOS with single core system HarmonyOS NEXT included on native APP in Event-driven programming in a unified development environment and formerly built for Android-based EMUI for Huawei smartphones and tablets with HMS-enabled apk apps on AppGallery that improves app performance. It supports a variety of dynamic and static programming languages such as JS, TS, and ArkTS. It is the compilation and runtime base that enables OpenHarmony, Oniro OS alongside HarmonyOS NEXT to run on multiple device forms such as smart devices, mobile phones, PCs, tablets, TVs, automobiles, and wearables. ArkCompiler consists of two parts, compiler toolchain and runtime.
BiSheng Compiler is an open-source compiler toolchain developed by Huawei for general-purpose processor architectures, such as Kunpeng within HiSilicon domain. It introduces and enhances multiple compilation optimization technologies and supports different programming languages, such as ArkTS, Cangjie, C, C++ and Fortran.
ArkTS is a high-level general-purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Huawei which is a superset of open-source TypeScript, in turn a superset of JavaScript formerly used in July 2022 HarmonyOS 3.0 version, alongside its evolved percussor, extended TypeScript (eTS) built for HarmonyOS development as a shift towards Declarative programming. ArkTS compiles to machine code via it's Ahead-of-time compilation Ark Compiler. ArkTS was first released in September 30, 2021 on OpenHarmony, and the ArkTS toolchain has shipped in DevEco Studio since version 3.1, released in 2022. Since, OpenHarmony 4.0 release on October 26, 2023, ArkTS APIs has been added to the open source community to contribute.
ArkGraphics 2D is an open source 2D graphics library written in C++ for HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony-Oniro based operating systems. ArkGraphics 2D API abstracts away platform-specific graphics API which differ from ArkGraphics 3D API. It is compared to other 2D computer graphics API such as Skia Graphics Engine.
