[Haskell-cafe] GLUT, FLGW, FLGW-b

[Sven Panne]

2013/12/12 Vlad Lopatin <madjestic13 at gmail.com>:
> I keep reading (wiki) that GLUT is a legacy package and some libraries (e.g.
> GLFW) are meant to replace it.  I also see that some of the GLUT
> functionality is based on fixed pipeline.  What is the current status of
> Haskell GLUT?  Is it 'to stay' or something that is going to be deprecated
> at some point?  Should one try replacing it with GLFW(-b) in a project, if
> fixed pipeline is not expected to be used?

I think this really depends on your needs: GLUT was designed as a
simple cross-platform API for OpenGL demos and tutorials, perhaps even
some programs of medium complexity. It was definitely not designed for
programs with complex GUI requirements. Of course you can build your
own GUI on top of OpenGL, but GLUT provides no help for that.

If you only need to create a few windows or use fullscreen, and if you
are happy with GLUT's simple event model, you can happily use it. If
you don't use forward-compatible OpenGL contexts, you can even use
GLUT's menus, fonts and geometric objects, because these are the parts
of GLUT which use the fixed pipeline internally IIRC.

Furthermore, I intend to continue maintaining the GLUT package, but
there is not that much left to do, because the underlying C library
(freeglut nowadays) hasn't really changed that much in the last few
years and I think the Haskell binding is feature-complete. If not:
https://github.com/haskell-opengl/GLUT/issues ;-)