Chapter 1: The Graphics Pipeline by Joe Groff OpenGL provides a C API, not C++, but of course the API is callable from C++.įor more information about OpenGL and the rendering pipeline see the following references: Note that OpenGL is concerned only with rendering graphics it does not provide functions for animation, timing, file I/O, image file format processing, or a GUI. For example, on Microsoft Windows, OpenGL functions are included in the driver for you graphics card, on Mac/OS X, Apple has provided an implementation, albeit an old version, and on Linux, OpenGL is provided as an extension to the X Windowing system. Instead, the OpenGL specification is provided as part of your operating system or its drivers. That is, you cannot find a website that provides a download for an OpenGL library. OpenGL is a specification (an API) it is not a library. Don’t teach me to use your libraries, teach me OpenGL programming!

Many of the websites and books on OpenGL programming provide their own libraries that hide parts of OpenGL.

If you ever do get an executable file, it crashes when you run it. “Just code this and it will work”, they say, but when you try it, it doesn’t because the build system can’t find the header files needed, or the libraries.

Every author makes many assumptions about what you already know.

The biggest problem is that while the code MAY show you how to do things, they don’t really explain what each of these choices are and why they chose the specific windowing API that they used. That’s a lot of acronyms and alternatives.

Every page starts at a different place for example, some of the sample code starts with SFML, SDL, or GLFW, others with GLUT or FreeGLUT, and still others start with wxWidgets or Qt or the Win32 API.

Other authors state that you should not code this way because there is heavy use of deprecated functions.

Some of the pages and posts are very old, with code dating back to OpenGL 1.0.

The are several reasons reasons for this:

So why am I writing yet another article about this? Because I had a hard time developing a simple OpenGL based program using Visual Studio. There are a lot of web pages and websites that discuss OpenGL programming. Note: before publishing, see GLEW and Win32 sections re: Nuget

Opengl 4.4 glfw