Re: [Mesa3d-users] sgi's glut vs mesa-glut

[Stephen J B. <sj...@li...>]

On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, William Gacquer wrote:

> I have found freeglut ( http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/ ) and I
> really would
> like to know how it differs from sgi-glut and Mesa-glut with the
> exception of the license.

I've taken over as the maintainer of freeglut (although I can't claim
to have written it).  My intention is that it should be a clone of
GLUT - minus the ancient and SGI-specific stuff like dials and buttons
boxes and dynamic video resize.  It comes close to that goal - there
are just a couple of things it doesn't implement - but most programs
compile and run with freeglut without problems.

The main reason to have it is that it has a clear and unambiguous
license (Xfree) and hence can be maintained by the community in a
reasonably sensible manner.  The "GLUT classic" license is unclear
- and attempts to get Mark Kilgard to clarify it only resulted in
more obfuscation.

Pawel Olszta (the original author of freeglut) intended to start work
on freeglut 2.0 which was going to have lots of extra bells and
whistles.  He didn't get very far with that and I have no intention
of going in that direction - although others might and the freeglut
license certainly permits that.

freeglut's implementation differs from GLUT-classic in a couple of
significant ways - for example, the pull-down menu's are rendered in
OpenGL instead of using the underlying windowing system.  That's
good because it makes freeglut easier to port - and on ancient
graphics devices like Voodoo-1's and -2's, it was the only way
to make those menu's work (GLUT doesn't work well with those
cards).

I don't think many people are actually using freeglut - it's
mailing list gets almost zero traffic.


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Steve Baker                      (817)619-2657 (Vox/Vox-Mail)
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