Qt & OpenGL OS X: GLSL shader version only 120 on Mountain Lion

Question

I'm trying to move some code from the fixed function OpenGL to GLSL shaders, by following along with the arcsynthesis tutorials. First I ran into the issue that version 330 isn't available which after a quick search seemed common, but the recommendation is that 150 should work fine. However, aside from 120 there's no other GLSL shader versions available, is this normal for a 2013 Macbook Air on 10.8.4? Or is there some weirdness going on with the combination of OpenGL + Qt 5 under OS X?

EDIT: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/GLEssentials/Introduction/Intro.html if I build the sample app there I can use 140 and 150 (not tried 330 as it requires shader rewrites). Does anyone know if this is a specific issue related to OpenGL, Qt5 and OS X?

Answer 1

So:

QGLFormat glFormat;
glFormat.setVersion(3, 2);
glFormat.setProfile(QGLFormat::CoreProfile);

// Set the default GL format to OpenGL 3.2 Core
QGLFormat::setDefaultFormat(glFormat);

That's what's needed for it to work, which is helpfully not obvious in the documentation. That'll give you 150. If you changed the glFormat.setVersion(3, 2) to 3, 3 it seems to give version 330 but I have no idea how reliable this will be until I've done some more work.