GLUT - Definition and Overview

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

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

GLUT was written by Mark J. 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 more easy. 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 APIs.

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

External link

• GLUT documentation (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/glut/spec3/spec3.html)