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"freeGLUT and GLUT"

What is GLUT?

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 and mouse input. Routines for drawing a number of geometric primitives (both in solid and wireframe mode) are also provided, including cubes, spheres, and the Utah teapot. GLUT even has some limited support for creating pop-up menus.

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.

What are they and their differences?

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.

With GLUT, you can create wonders and the game of your dreams.

For more information about GLUT, visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeglut
Now you know what is freeGLUT and GLUT.

Jay
Bleeding Visuals Author

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