What does the Flash VM use under the hood for drawing?

Question

In windows, what does Flash use under the hood?

It's a relatively simple question which I can never find the answer to. Is it GDI (for windows VM implementations) or something else?

You don't need to go into any of the new GPU acceleration features of Flash. I just really want to know the inner workings because it's NEVER discussed.

Answer 1

On 64-bit Linux, the Flash plugin does not link against SDL (according to ldd). It does, however, link against GTK, GDK, and Cairo. It appears, therefore, that it is using either Cairo or raw Xlib calls to do its drawing on Linux.

I don't know on Windows. Flash tends to have minimal dependencies, but Direct-X may be standard enough that they use it. With some kind of a process examiner to tell you what libraries a process has loaded, you could examine a simple web browser embedding Flash and see what system facilities are actually in use.