Sorry for the delay in this post, but here’s Part III.
For reference, you probably want to start out with Part’s II and I here and here.
Last we left off I said I’d get into some of the basic mechanics of GLUT and OpenGL, so let’s hit the ground running.
GLUT
GLUT, or the Graphics Library Utility Toolkit, is a cross-platform C library for generating windows and handling IO events. Basically, GLUT was written so you can get to learning OpenGL very quickly without having to spend enormous amounts of time learning how to handle mouse or keyboard actions in your current OS, or worse, learn how to setup a simple GUI just so you can see your work. On top of making these tasks simpler, GLUT is, as I mentioned, cross-platform. This means that you can take your code and recompile it on another OS as long as you have the appropriate GLUT library referenced in your IDE. There are currently versions of GLUT created for Linux, OS X, Windows, and probably even more operating systems.
So how do we create a simple window?