[Lazarus] GLUT vs windows 64 bits

[Reimar Grabowski]

On Mon, 14 Apr 2014 17:07:43 -0400
Anthony Tekatch <anthony at unihedron.com> wrote:

> I am a bit confused now. This page seems to use GLUT for many examples:
>   http://wiki.freepascal.org/OpenGL_Tutorial
> is it out of date?
Well, concerning OpenGL use yes.
The type of OpenGL you see there is deprecated ("fixed function") modern OpenGL is shader based.
On the other hand using GLUT for simple Demos is using GLUT as it was meant to be used but it should not be used for complete applications as it is very limited and old.

> I would like to easily draw shapes like a torus/sphere/cone etc., and also
> put some rotatable text in a 3D image for a Lazarus project on a
> Windows/Mac/Linux systems. This seems to be easily done with GLUT, but
> will require the installation of a glut32.dll or a freeglut dll file, is
> that true?
Yes.
 
> Looking forward to your recommendations.
If you just want to get your stuff going, go ahead use freeglut (as it at least lets you exit GLUTs application main loop). But remember that you are using a deprecated API and not using the hardware resources to their fullest.
Modern OpenGL (3+) has a steeper learning curve but is a much better API the old one is only around for legacy applications.

hih
R.