OpenGL Utility Toolkit

: This article is about the OpenGL toolkit. GLUT can also stand for glucose transporter.

The OpenGL Utility widget toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level input/output with the host operating system. Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of Computer keyboard and Computer mouse input. Routines for drawing a number of geometric primitives (both in solid and wireframe mode) are also provided, including cube (geometry)s, spheres, and the Utah teapot. GLUT even has some limited support for creating pop-up windows.

GLUT was written by Mark Kilgard, author of OpenGL Programming for the X Window System and The CG Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics .

The two aims of GLUT are to allow the creation of rather portable code between operating systems (GLUT is Cross-platform) and to make learning OpenGL easier. Getting started with OpenGL programming while using GLUT often takes only a few lines of code and requires no knowledge of operating system–specific windowing application programming interfaces.

A GLUT function starts with the glut prefix (for example, glutPostRedisplay rerenders the current screen).

Freeglut and its spin-off, OpenGLUT, are open source alternatives to GLUT. Freeglut attempts to be a fairly exact clone, OpenGLUT adds a number of new features to the API. Both have the advantage of licensing that permits users to modify and redistribute the library.

= See Also =

GLU

GLUI

=External link=

*[http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/glut/spec3/spec3.html GLUT documentation] *[http://openglut.sourceforge.net/ OpenGLUT webpage]