FreeGLUT is an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
alternative to the
OpenGL Utility Toolkit
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard ...
(GLUT) library. GLUT (and hence FreeGLUT) allows the user to create and manage windows containing OpenGL contexts on a wide range of platforms and also read the mouse, keyboard and joystick functions. FreeGLUT is intended to be a full replacement for GLUT, and has only a few differences.
Since GLUT has gone into stagnation, FreeGLUT is in development to improve the toolkit. It is released under the
MIT License
The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...
.
History
FreeGLUT was originally written by Paweł W. Olszta with contributions from Andreas Umbach and Steve Baker. Since Paweł ceased working in 3D graphics, he passed the baton to Steve Baker. The current maintainers of FreeGLUT are John F. Fay, John Tsiombikas, and Diederick C. Niehorster.
Paweł started FreeGLUT development on December 1, 1999. The project is now virtually a 100% replacement for the original GLUT with only a few departures (such as the abandonment of SGI-specific features such as the Dials&Buttons box and Dynamic Video Resolution) and a shrinking set of bugs.
FreeGLUT contains a few enhancements over the original GLUT - but as a matter of policy, no further significant features will be added.
In April 2015, FreeGLUT obtained initial support for the new
Wayland display server protocol.
OpenGLUT
Some members of the FreeGLUT team who wanted to add features forked the code to create OpenGLUT.
Development of OpenGLUT ceased in May 2005; the last release was OpenGLUT-0.6.3 in March 2005.
Status
FreeGLUT is now very stable and has fewer bugs than the original
GLUT. However, there are places where the original GLUT specification did not make clear what order things like callbacks occur and it is possible for application programs that work under GLUT to fail under FreeGLUT because they assume something that GLUT never guaranteed to be true.
New revisions appear periodically; however, since it is now quite stable and no new features are planned, these updates are required less and less often. This would change if there was ever a new release of GLUT.
FreeGLUT is distributed instead of GLUT in some Linux distributions. Since it is upwards compatible at a binary level, programs compiled for GLUT can be linked to FreeGLUT without problems.
See also
*
EGL – an interface between
OpenGL ES
OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accel ...
or
OpenVG
OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces ...
and a
windowing system
In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm for ...
*
OpenGL User Interface Library
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
(GLUI)
*
OpenGL Utility Library
The OpenGL Utility Library (GLU) is a computer graphics library for OpenGL.
It consists of a number of functions that use the base OpenGL library to provide higher-level drawing routines from the more primitive routines that OpenGL provides. It ...
(GLU)
*
OpenGL Utility Toolkit
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard ...
(GLUT)
References
External links
*{{Official website, http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/
Source code repository
OpenGL
Software using the MIT license