Abstract: Primitive-based composition techniques are described. In one or more implementations, a global composition system may be configured to perform rendering for a plurality of applications. For example, the global composition system may be configured to expose one or more application programming interfaces (APIs) that are accessible to the applications. The APIs may then be used to cause a single composition engine to perform the rendering for the plurality of applications. Further, the composition engine may support the use of primitives, which include one or more rendering instructions and thus an element associated with a visual to be rendered may be something other than a bitmap.