GLEW, in combo with NVIDIA drivers on 3.3 HW and third party sample code that uses ARB_debug_output. The debug context setups simply don’t work. It’s onerous to debug this stack just to get started. FreeGLUT didn’t handle the contexts correctly for some reason. My jury is out on GLFW. It may be better, but at this point I no longer trust anyone’s wrapper over OpenGL and OS stuff. All I ever end up doing is digging, digging, digging to get started on square one. I still haven’t figured out if GLEW is actually worthless, or it’s the windowing libraries such as FreeGLUT or GLFW that cause the problems. I do see giving up on GLEW and rolling my own as a valid scenario, and from a “get started” standpoint, that’s pathetic.
So, stale 2.1 docs? Who cares. I’ve tried to fry so much bigger fish.
Everyone who wants to use OpenGL should know that what they get is OpenGL - nothing else - so the risk of having to implement your own stuff or use some third party lib is something we have to live with. Actually it sometimes is comforting not having to rely on some major corporation for other parts of your program.
I wish I had had the impression up front that I should not rely on third party libraries for anything. It would have saved me two months. I even did the “goody two shoes open source thing” of filing bugs and trying to come up with some fixes. A few of those changes got acted upon, but mostly crickets chirped. The development energy for dealing with the warts simply isn’t there.
Sure you need to know how they work, but that’s also the case if you have a compilation of libs like DirectX.
Using GLEW with OpenGL is like using a third party library just to write straight DirectX code. OpenGL is really junky in this regard, and these third party stacks mess up the basics.
The same goes for the old FAQ which has massive amounts of outdated material but still isn’t taken offline. The only thing you’ll see is the note “NOTE: This page contains old archived material and may not be relevant anymore.” at the top of the page. The official SDK hosts links to legacy tutorials, outdated tools and stuff that’s simply a duplicate of pages already available in other parts of opengl.org.
I think all this OpenGL “SDK” stuff should be burned. It’s a lie. A SDK is something that integrates a bunch of basic components so that developers can download it all at once and be quickly productive. What opengl.org implements is an anti-SDK. An invitation to investigate everything, find out that most things are inconsistent and slightly broken, and develop a complete lack of trust that anything off-the-shelf is worth bothering with.
If not burned, then Khronos should work on a real SDK. 2.1 stuff could be moved to a proper “Legacy” or “Archive” section of such a SDK. It would be there for someone who needs it, but wouldn’t get front page advertizement anymore.