Overview

GLUT is an OpenGL Utility Toolkit that makes the creation of OpenGL applications easier, because it provides a simple OpenGL window environment that is operating system independent. This means you can write a single OpenGL program that will work on both Win32 PCs and UNIX workstations. Mark J. Kilgard developed GLUT; Nate Robins and Paul Mayfield, with help from Layne Christensen, were responsible for porting GLUT to the Windows 95 and NT environments. GLUT is well suited for users who are learning OpenGL and developing simple OpenGL applications; however, if your application needs a more sophisticated user interface, you should use the Win32 APIs.

When developing applications using GLUT, you need to use it in conjunction with f90gl. f90gl provides the official Fortran 90 bindings for OpenGL and GLU as well as the application of those bindings to GLUT. It is a public domain implementation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. f90gl is not included with Visual Fortran, but you can download the f90gl compiled libraries from the Visual Fortran Web site. Go to http://www.compaq.com/fortran/ and look under "Downloads."

Note that all inquiries and bug reports for f90GL or GLUT should be sent to the address below or to and not to the Visual Fortran Web site.

William F. Mitchell
Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division
100 Bureau Dr. Stop 8910
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8910

The f90gl web page is at http://math.nist.gov/f90gl/.

D.1 What happens after I download f90gl?

This section will...