A device generates an immutable display graph with leaves of the display graph representing low-level graphical operations such as drawings lines or a bitmap and nodes of the display graph representing translation and clipping. Because the display graph is immutable, it can be cached, shared, and rendered quickly. The structure of the display remains fixed, but elements such as rectangle fill, text position, clipping area, translation, and image location, remain time varying and can change without affecting the structure of the display.