Initializing OpenGL without GLUT

Question

every introduction and sample that I can find seems to use GLUT or some other framework to \"initialize\" OpenGL. Is there a way of initializing OpenGL with just what is av

Answer 1

GL is an API, and GLU is an utility library on top of GL. It's completely operating system independent.

OpenGL initialization and extension fetching are platform dependent operations. Therefore you can do about nothing with OpenGL alone.

GLUT is fast insufficient and terribly poor library, and about only it does is that it initializes the opengl context and provides some primitive mouse/keyboard input modules to get you ongoing.

Win32 provides tools to initialize opengl context as well. For linux you could check out GLX. Also, if you want a system independent way of doing it, then you could check out SDL. For different programming languages there may be utilities that provide you a platform independent desktop API.