Freeglut
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- The correct title of this article is freeglut. The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
| freeglut | |
 official logo |
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| Developer: | Pawel W. Olszta |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 2.4.0 / June, 2005 |
| OS: | Cross-platform |
| Use: | API |
| License: | X-Consortium |
| Website: | http://freeglut.sf.net |
freeglut is an open source alternative to the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (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 X-Consortium license.
[edit] History
freeglut was originally written by Pawel W. Olszta with contributions from Andreas Umbach and Steve Baker. Since Pawel ceased working in 3D graphics, he passed the baton to Steve Baker. Steve is now the official owner/maintainer of freeglut, although John Fay does most of the day-to-day work.
Pawel started freeglut development on December 1st, 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.
A consequence of that policy was that some members of the freeglut team forked the code to make OpenGLUT which had been planned to have many significant extensions. However, it's been several years since any significant changes or bug fixes have been made to OpenGLUT and it should probably be assumed to be a dead project.
[edit] 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.
