Practical 2

Freeglut VS GLUT

GLUT
The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) is a library of utilities for OpenGL programs, which primarily perform system-level I/O with the host operating system.

Functions performed include window definition, window control, and monitoring of keyboard and mouse input.

Routines for drawing a number of geometric primitives (both in solid and wireframe mode) are also provided, including cubes, spheres, and the Utah teapot.

GLUT even has some limited support for creating pop-up menus.

Freeglut
Freeglut is a completely OpenSourced alternative to the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) library. GLUT was originally written by Mark Kilgard to support the sample programs in the second edition OpenGL 'RedBook'.

Since then, GLUT has been used in a wide variety of practical applications because it is simple, widely available and highly portable.

GLUT (and hence freeglut) allows the user to create and manage windows containing OpenGL contexts on a wide range of platforms and also read the mouse, keyboard and joystick functions.


Overall
In my opinion, Freeglut seems to be the better version for usage. The features made available by freeglut can assure the user's code to be more stable. Since glut has several limitations, such as the "callback" function, applications working in GLUT might not work in Freeglut.