Limitations
Some of GLUT's original design decisions made it hard for programmers to perform desired tasks. This led many to create non-canon patches and extensions to GLUT. Some free software or open source reimplementations also include fixes.
Some of the more notable limitations of the original GLUT library include:
- The library requires programmers to call
glutMainLoop
, a function which never returns. This makes it hard for programmers to integrate GLUT into a program or library which wishes to have control of its own event loop. A common patch to fix this is to introduce a new function, calledglutCheckLoop
(Mac OS X) orglutMainLoopEvent
(freeglut/OpenGLUT), which runs only a single iteration of the GLUT event loop. Another common workaround is to run GLUT's event loop in a separate thread, although this may vary by operating system, and also may introduce synchronization issues or other problems: for example, the Mac OS X GLUT implementation requires thatglutMainLoop
be run in the main thread. - The fact that
glutMainLoop
never returns also means that a GLUT program cannot exit the event loop. freeglut fixes this by introducing a new function,glutLeaveMainLoop
. - The library terminates the process when the window is closed; for some applications this may not be desired. Thus, many implementations include an extra callback, such as
glutWMCloseFunc
.
Since it is no longer maintained (essentially replaced by the open source freeglut) the above design issues are still not resolved in the original GLUT.
Read more about this topic: OpenGL Utility Toolkit
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