from the about opengl page
‘OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API)’
Originally posted by ogl_is_great:
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If OpenGL can be used for 2d graphics, has anyone tried using it for the foundation of a windowing system?
For instance, why or why not would it make sense to implement XWindows using OpenGL as the foundation?
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Firtsly, Opengl is a graphics API, it allows you to draw 2D & 3D graphics to a portion of that screen. Ultimately it requires a windowing system for it to be used. Implimenting XWindows using openGL is a paradox, it requires XWindows in order to be used (or any other system, eg win32 api etc)
There are however portable UI’s that are available specifically for openGL (check out glui), but usually that side of things is taken care of by the native windowing systems