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.
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; and most recently, DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4 circa 2011. 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.
Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) is a collection of proprietary services and 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 running the HarmonyOS operating system, and on its earlier devices running the Android operating system including devices already distributed with Google Mobile Services.
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 commercial version of the IoT 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 an open-source version of HarmonyOS donated 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.
Eclipse Foundation Oniro OS, or Oniro OS, is a vendor-netural open-source distro based on OpenHarmony in partnership with OpenAtom Foundation. Similar to HarmonyOS, the open-source distributed operating system built for Internet of things that is designed with a multi-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.
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 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 a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API developed by Huawei as a superset of Ark Engine. 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 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, 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 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 it's 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 December 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.
ArkWeb is a native proprietary software engine by Huawei for HarmonyOS NEXT system on HarmonyOS used for Huawei Browser and third-party WebView applications.
ArkGraphics 2D is an proprietary 2D graphics library written in C++. 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.
