It never works… call a function that isn’t supported, means you call an unsupoorted function! Gl_ERROR vs not supported. Call a Win16 function… it won’t work - rather than trick you into thinking it does work.
I don’t understand what you’re saying. What do you mean by “a function that isn’t supported?” And what does Win16 have to do with OpenGL?
As to your reference to the GLEW library, I’ve never used it. Because it is out of date! It’s always out of date. Is that so hard to understand?
It is? In what way is it out of date? It seems to work. It has some quirks with core contexts, but they have a workaround for it, and it’s documented. So in what way is it out of date?
More to the point - if you read my post, you’d understand that I have alreay written my own code to support the various Gl versions!
Yeah, so have I. Unlike you however, I documented my code and gave it away, thus solving the same problem for other people.
What have you done to make OpenGL better for others?
Maybe you don’t appreciate the size of the problem.
I understand the problem. But complaining about it isn’t solving it.
This “problem” has existed since OpenGL 1.2 fourteen years ago. The ARB hasn’t solved it. When someone hasn’t done something for 14 years, you might think it would occur to people that this means they aren’t going to solve it. So either we, the OpenGL community, gets together and solves it, or nothing is going to change.
I’m doing my part. The folks who maintain GLEW are doing their part.
Are you going to pitch in? Or are you just going to sit on the sidelines and complain while nothing gets done? If you are, I wish you’d do it somewhere else; the complaints to nobody that’s listening are becoming tiresome.
The future of OpenGL depends on it.
Please. The “future of OpenGL” is exactly where it is today, regardless of what the ARB does. Do you think that if there were some widely adopted library for loading functions (which GLEW technically is, since 90+% of tutorials will direct you to it) that this would magically cause AAA game developers to start using OpenGL? That it would increase OpenGL usage among people who don’t already use it?
No. People aren’t going to rewrite their codebases to use OpenGL just because we have a function loading API signed off on by the ARB. OpenGL is the only means for accessing hardware accelerated 3D graphics on non-Windows platforms. In most cases, this is the only reason it is used: to write platform-neutral 3D code, or to write Linux/MacOSX-specific 3D code.
So either the scope of your project requires OpenGL (because it’s on a platform where there are no alternatives), or you’re using Direct3D. That’s not “the future”; that’s the last 5 years.