scrap opengl32.dll

[l_belev]

I'm not sure why glW is being proposed in this thread. Please make OpenGL cross platform and get rid of wgl/glX/agl and all that craziness.

That would be best but first we will have to get rid of all the different OS-es plus their different window-systems and leave only one
For OS i would choose unix, but as for the windowing-system i don't know. I don't like the X-winows very much, especially it's network transparency which has no meaningful use and only adds overhead.

[kRogue]

I'm not sure why glW is being proposed in this thread. Please make OpenGL cross platform and get rid of wgl/glX/agl and all that craziness.

I am not at all sure that a "cross-platform" thingamajig for glX/wgl/egl that makes users happy is really possible. Some will jump up and down and say that EGL is just that, except that I am not happy with it Issues such as "window handle", "display handle", "pixmap" crop up (in EGL it is left as a typedef in EGL.h dependent via #ifdef on the platform) and EGL is strongly married to essentially double vs single buffered surfaces which are not always the right thing to use. Additional ugly issues pop up all the freaking time in integration with compositing window managers, etc. Lastly, a generic API is likely to suffer from these bits:

• Shoots for the lowest common denominator
• Convoluted bits to be cross platform API where certain concepts either do not make sense on some platforms, or certain concepts are very painful to expose in a cross platform API

On a quasi-related note, oh yes, X11 just sucks.


The concept is usually simple: give me a surface to which to render, give me a context with which to render. The latter concept is pretty cross platform, but the former is ugly as it can be tightly coupled to the concepts of the system and hardware (for example the bit-depth pain of X11-visuals to bits of an EGLSurface for example), fullscreen vs windowed and other bits tied to the hardware of a platform. Sometimes it can be show-horned, but often not...the whole thing can get wicked hairy. Then the sicked hairy is cruel in that the context possible for a surface may depend on the surface...

[l_belev]

by the way my fictional "glW" interface partially solves the cross-platform issue in that at least the context creation is not tied to the concrete windowing system. And if you only need the gl context for offscreen rendering, you can keep total platform independence.
Its only when you need to show something to a "window", you will have to know about the OS/window-system you are on.

In that sense the functions CTX glWCreateContext(int device, CTX share, int *attribs), glWMakeCurrent(CTX ctx), .. could just be named glCreateContext, glMakeCurrent, .. and the opengl's platform independence will increase considerably.