Related toolkits and APIs

Revision as of 12:33, 10 June 2011 by Zyx 2000 (talk | contribs) (Context/Window Toolkits)

Jump to: navigation, search

Toolkits top on OpenGL

Many programming interfaces are layered on OpenGL with rich and varied functionality. Not all can interoperate.

Extension libraries

A extension libraries simplifies the work with OpenGL extensions. They are also used to get the function pointers for core OpenGL functions.

A extension library for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, and Solaris.
A extension library for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. Possibly defunct.
An OpenGL3/4 Core context loading library for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

Scene graphs

A scene graph works on the top of OpenGL.

Open Scene Graph 
This scene graph works on all Windows platforms, OSX, GNU/Linux, and IRIX.

Game engines/toolkits

A C++ 3D game engine with Python bindings.
Game engine based on Open Scene Graph and ODE.
A cross platform C++ toolkit library with a BSD style license. Essentially the library offers a series of different functionality under a streamlined API. Its primary focus is on games, although not limited for that usage only.


An open-source cross-platform framework using OpenGL.

Toolkits working alongside OpenGL

Context/Window Toolkits

The creation of a window to render stuff in is not covered in the OpenGL specification. This is handled by platform-specific APIs. There are several toolkits that takes care of creating an OpenGL context and window by using the platform-specific APIs. Those are often referred to as widget toolkits.

  • GLUT : A crossplatform windowing and keyboard/mouse handler. Very old, consider using other toolkits instead.
  • GLFW : A crossplatform windowing and keyboard/mouse/joystick handler. Contrary to GLUT, this is more aimed for creating games. Supports Windows, Mac OS X and Unix-like systems such as Linux and FreeBSD.
  • FLTK : A small widget library.
  • Qt : A toolkit which abstracts the Linux, MacOS X and Windows away.
  • SDL : A crossplatform multimedia library written in C. SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported.
  • SFML : A cross-platform multimedia C++ API that provides you low and high level access to graphics, input, audio, etc. Free, still updated and written in C++.

Image and Texture Libraries


Math Libraries


Sound or Audio Libraries
