Andy Little wrote:
Pragmatically what I'm interested in is finding some basic Graphics capability, which is cross-platform and available, just because that is the natural output format for geometry and would be very helpful for a geometry library. I have heard that GLUT could provide this basic functionality. Is that the case?
GLUT is a wrapper around the platform-dependent parts of OpenGL, but not by itself capable of any graphic output. It needs OpenGL itself for that. Let me elaborate. OpenGL requires a graphics context. However, OpenGL itself provides no means of obtaining one, as such an action is inherently platform-dependent and thus misplaced in a platform-independent library such as OpenGL. The means of obtaining a context differ from platform to platform. Win32 offers WGL, the X Windows System offers GLX, and Macintosh offers AGL. Other platforms may have yet more such system libraries. GLUT is primarily a unified wrapper around these platform-dependent libraries. In addition, GLUT provides a few functions to draw some graphics primitives, such as cubes, cones, and teapots, and functions to handle menus. Sebastian Redl