Epoxy is a library for handling OpenGL function pointer management for you.
It hides the complexity of dlopen(), dlsym(),
glXGetProcAddress(), eglGetProcAddress(), etc. from the
app developer, with very little knowledge needed on their part. They
get to read GL specs and write code using undecorated function names
like glCompileShader().
Don't forget to check for your extensions or versions being present before you use them, just like before! We'll tell you what you forgot to check for instead of just segfaulting, though.
glBufferData() can be
used with GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object implementations, along
with GL 1.5+ implementations../autogen.sh
make
sudo make install
Dependencies for debian:
Dependencies for OS X (macports):
The test suite has additional dependencies depending on the platform. (X11, EGL, a running X Server).
It should be as easy as replacing:
#include <GL/gl.h>
#include <GL/glx.h>
#include <GL/glext.h>
with:
#include <epoxy/gl.h>
#include <epoxy/glx.h>
As long as epoxy's headers appear first, you should be ready to go. Additionally, some new helpers become available, so you don't have to write them:
int epoxy_gl_version() returns the GL version:
bool epoxy_has_gl_extension() returns whether a GL extension is
available (GL_ARB_texture_buffer_object, for example).
Note that this is not terribly fast, so keep it out of your hot paths, ok?
GLEW has several issues:
glewInit()
autodetects the world.The motivation for this project came out of previous use of libGLEW in piglit. Other GL dispatch code generation projects had similar failures. Ideally, piglit wants to be able to build a single binary for a test that can run on whatever context or window system it chooses, not based on link time choices.
We had to solve some of GLEW's problems for piglit and solving them meant replacing every single piece of GLEW, so we built piglit-dispatch from scratch. And since we wanted to reuse it in other GL-related projects, this is the result.
The automatic per-context symbol resolution for win32 requires that
epoxy knows when wglMakeCurrent() is called, because
wglGetProcAddress() return values depend on the context's device and
pixel format. If wglMakeCurrent() is called from outside of
epoxy (in a way that might change the device or pixel format), then
epoxy needs to be notified of the change using the
epoxy_handle_external_wglMakeCurrent() function.
The win32 wglMakeCurrent() variants are slower than they should be, because they should be caching the resolved dispatch tables instead of resetting an entire thread-local dispatch table every time.