GLEW

Developers who use C or C++ programming languages might require a way of determining the functionality of the OpenGL extensions. GLEW was created in order to provide precisely such capabilities and it will allow users to determine which OpenGL extensions are supported on the target platform.

This library will display the OpenGL core’s functionality in a single header file, this way allowing people to view the required information quickly. Supporting OpenGL 4.5, the library will allow one to load the preferred extension and it is forward compatible with the OpenGL, WGL and GLX extensions.

One of the main features bundled with the library is the “glewinfo” component, which can be used in order to determine if the capabilities of an OpenGL implementation are valid. After running the corresponding command, users will be able to visualize a text file report containing detailed information about the status of the GL versions.

To initialize the library, people must first create a valid OpenGL rendering context, which needs to be named “glewInit()” and in case everything is correct, the “GLEW_OK” string will be returned. In order to check for extensions which are available on their platforms, people can query globally defined variables with the form: GLEW_{extension_name}.

The library will obtain the information regarding the supported extensions by accessing the graphics card driver. However, users must be warned that experimental or pre-release drivers might not report all the available extensions through the standard mechanism. In such cases, GLEW will report them as unsupported.