glut vs no glut

… Being new to OpenGL, but having been a programmer for many years, I am wondering if using GLUT provides a (minor?) performance hit … as opposed to manually opening windows yourself, etc… For 3D games, what is the prefered choice? GLUT or something else?

Thanks,

i imagine that there are things in glut that could be done faster if you knew exactly what OS you were writing for. but the kind of performance hit you’d take from using glut, in comparison with the kind of performance hit you’d take if your graphics algorithms are sloppy, is so negligible that i would advise you not even consider it.

that being said, if you have some windows programming experience (working with the win32 API or MFC), then it would probably be better to just write your own framework for handling the windows stuff. if you do that, then it’d be easier to write, for example, a level editor that uses opengl for the graphics and MFC for windows management. i don’t know if it’d be feasible to do something like that with glut directly.

i’m not sure, but i’d guess that professional 3d games don’t use glut.