I’ve just begun to experiment with Glut. It would seem that it merely facilitates the learning of opengl, so functionality like lighting, color, and texture mapping must be used through “pure” opengl functions. am I correct?
-ZomCoder
Glut provides simplified access to lower level platform specific functions (e.g the creation of a device context and rendering context). To that degree, yes, it eases the learning curve of OpenGL.
Moreover, however, glut provides a base from which to create applications (however small or large) which are truly platform independent. One could simply recompile the same source code on two different platforms and create binaries for each. This proverbial glue also allows for simple demonstrations of more advanced techniques of lighting or texturing by providing predefined models which can be called with a single function (e.g. glutSolidTeapot(1.0f);).
Does that address your concern?
Glossifah