Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GLFW 3.3 Is Released

glfw.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 35 posts

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#11

Post by childintime »

klodolph wrote: post #3

For those who wonder what GLFW is... if you want to play with OpenGL or Vulkan, make a graphics demo, or make a game, GLFW is a library that frees you from having to deal with the nuances of Win32/X11/etc, wrangles keyboard inputs and other things across platforms. It is similar to LibSDL, but is more lightweight and GPU-centric. GLFW is designed more with greenfield projects in mind, whereas LibSDL was designed from…

I got to know of glfw because a few GUI libs which embed Flutter (in Rust or Go) use it. Maybe it's just a hyperbole, but will this release help those efforts?

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#12

Post by [deleted] »

enriquto wrote: post #10

Can somebody explain what are the advantages of glfw over freeglut? (other than the non-issue of "being" old) I am using freeglut for casual opengl code, and I see no problem with it. Is there anything that I am missing?

[deleted]

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#13

Post by eropple »

enriquto wrote: post #10

Can somebody explain what are the advantages of glfw over freeglut? (other than the non-issue of "being" old) I am using freeglut for casual opengl code, and I see no problem with it. Is there anything that I am missing?

Back when I was doing a lot with this stuff, GLUT was effectively dead. Stuff like MacOS HiDPI surfaces wasn't doable without going well outside of what GLUT wanted to help you with. GLFW has been under active development over that time period, unifying baseline OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan stuff to build upon.

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#14

Post by enriquto »

eropple wrote: post #13
enriquto wrote: post #10

Can somebody explain what are the advantages of glfw over freeglut? (other than the non-issue of "being" old) I am using freeglut for casual opengl code, and I see no problem with it. Is there anything that I am missing?

Back when I was doing a lot with this stuff, GLUT was effectively dead. Stuff like MacOS HiDPI surfaces wasn't doable without going well outside of what GLUT wanted to help you with. GLFW has been under active development over that time period, unifying baseline OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Vulkan stuff to build upon.

Indeed, GLUT is not in active development (I would not say that it is "effectively dead" but rather that it "crystallized into a perfect form", but I digress). However, I was asking about "freeglut", which is a different thing, which is actively developed: last commit on 2019-03-26 dropped some unnecessary dependencies, for example.

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#15

Post by bryanphe »

Very excited for this release! GLFW is part of the foundation for a UI framework we're building called Revery [1] and there are several features in 3.3 that will be useful for us - transparent framebuffers, headless backend via OSMesa (important for CI / automation), and high-DPI improvements.

GLFW takes a lot of the pain out of cross-platform GPU development, and I've found the API simple and intuitive to work with. For those looking to play with it - the LearnOpenGL tutorial series [2] is excellent, and uses GLFW for managing a window and getting an OpenGL context.

Thank you maintainers for your work on it!

- [1] Revery: https://github.com/revery-ui/revery

- [2] LearnOpenGL: https://learnopengl.com/Getting-started/Creating-a-window

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#16

Post by klodolph »

kbenson wrote: post #5
klodolph wrote: post #3

For those who wonder what GLFW is... if you want to play with OpenGL or Vulkan, make a graphics demo, or make a game, GLFW is a library that frees you from having to deal with the nuances of Win32/X11/etc, wrangles keyboard inputs and other things across platforms. It is similar to LibSDL, but is more lightweight and GPU-centric. GLFW is designed more with greenfield projects in mind, whereas LibSDL was designed from…

So, it's sort of like GLUT was? (is?) I only messed around with 3D rendering a little back in the very early 2000's, but from what I remember, GLUT made everything much easier.

I would say that any time you are using GLUT for new projects, you really should be using GLFW or LibSDL instead.

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#17

Post by genpfault »

bryanphe wrote: post #15

Very excited for this release! GLFW is part of the foundation for a UI framework we're building called Revery [1] and there are several features in 3.3 that will be useful for us - transparent framebuffers, headless backend via OSMesa (important for CI / automation), and high-DPI improvements. GLFW takes a lot of the pain out of cross-platform GPU development, and I've found the API simple and intuitive to work with.…

Sadly Mesa's software renderers seem to have topped out at OpenGL 3.3[1] :(

[1]: https://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL3.3-GLSL3.30

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#18

Post by glalonde »

genpfault wrote: post #17
bryanphe wrote: post #15

Very excited for this release! GLFW is part of the foundation for a UI framework we're building called Revery [1] and there are several features in 3.3 that will be useful for us - transparent framebuffers, headless backend via OSMesa (important for CI / automation), and high-DPI improvements. GLFW takes a lot of the pain out of cross-platform GPU development, and I've found the API simple and intuitive to work with.…

Sadly Mesa's software renderers seem to have topped out at OpenGL 3.3[1] :( [1]: https://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL3.3-GLSL3.30

Yeah I'm kinda surprised by this. You would think there would be some industry support for emulating graphics/gpgpu pipelines to make cloud CI cheaper and simpler, but maybe it's just a much harder problem than I imagine -- to the point where mocking opengl or using dedicated hardware makes more sense.

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#19

Post by muterad_murilax »

klodolph wrote: post #3

For those who wonder what GLFW is... if you want to play with OpenGL or Vulkan, make a graphics demo, or make a game, GLFW is a library that frees you from having to deal with the nuances of Win32/X11/etc, wrangles keyboard inputs and other things across platforms. It is similar to LibSDL, but is more lightweight and GPU-centric. GLFW is designed more with greenfield projects in mind, whereas LibSDL was designed from…

What does the FW in GLFW stand for?

Re: GLFW 3.3 Is Released

#20

Post by bryanphe »

genpfault wrote: post #17
bryanphe wrote: post #15

Very excited for this release! GLFW is part of the foundation for a UI framework we're building called Revery [1] and there are several features in 3.3 that will be useful for us - transparent framebuffers, headless backend via OSMesa (important for CI / automation), and high-DPI improvements. GLFW takes a lot of the pain out of cross-platform GPU development, and I've found the API simple and intuitive to work with.…

Sadly Mesa's software renderers seem to have topped out at OpenGL 3.3[1] :( [1]: https://mesamatrix.net/#Version_OpenGL3.3-GLSL3.30

Ah, that's too bad! I've been hunting for ways to get better integration tests on CI for Revery.

Would like to have image-based verification for certain classes of tests, and we use Azure CI pipelines - seems their VMs don't have hardware support at all for OpenGL (on any platform).

Post reply on HN