Thursday, June 14, 2007

Using OpenGL in Windows

You'd think that a graphics library like OpenGL (= Open Graphics Library) would be well supported on lots of systems. Not on Windows, well, at not by Microsoft at least.

It appears that Microsoft stopped officially supporting OpenGL in about 2000. Since then, of course, there have been many advances in graphics hardware, and OpenGL has evolved.

The answer is GLEW. It's not too difficult to use - simply download a binary distribution, add the headers and libraries to your project and you're away. (Building GLEW from source proves to be a bit more difficult.)

Even though Microsoft has such a huge market share in terms of operating systems, they still seem to go out of their way to make things difficult to use any open technologies (or non-Microsoft technologies).

That attitude doesn't breed any love from me.