Best OpenGL Toolkit

[Zaroth]

Hello all,

Whats the most up to date toolkit for OpenGL? I'm trying to learn GLUT but I heard its outdated. Should I try to learn OpenGL withou a toolkit? Is there any good tutorials with or without a toolkit? I'm just not sure where I should start

Thanks,
Zaroth

[Kopelrativ]

I would recommend glfw. It is a more minimalistic toolkit than glut. It enables you to create an OpenGL application almost independent on platform. There are some utilities in glut that depends on the deprecated immediate mode of OpenGL, but those are not part of glfw.

glew is also a kind of a toolkit, efficiently helping you to decode function addresses.

[Zyx_2000]

I'd say GLFW in combo with GLEW is the best. freeGLUT is overrated, its only advantage vs GLFW is that can be slightly easier to use for some.

[Zaroth]

Yeah GLFW does look good, is there any books or online tutorials explaining how to use it? The most useful thing I found was the user manual on their website

[Kopelrativ]

The glfw manuals are quite good. For simple examples, download the source.

[menzel]

glfw doesn't do much, so no big manual and no long list of tutorials is needed. It's small, cross platform, supports the OpenGL 3.2 core context on Mac OSX Lion and gives you a lot of options to configure your context (even ARB_debug_extension works well with glfw).
I'd recommend it too.

[Alfonse Reinheart]

GLFW (and FreeGLUT for that matter) comes with a bunch of examples, if you need to see how they basically work.