GLFW

Introduction

GLFW is an Open Source, multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and Vulkan application development. It provides a simple, platform-independent API for creating windows, contexts and surfaces, reading input, handling events, etc.

GLFW natively supports Windows, macOS and Linux and other Unix-like systems. On Linux both Wayland and X11 are supported.

GLFW is licensed under the zlib/libpng license.

You can download the latest stable release as source or Windows binaries. Each release starting with 3.0 also has a corresponding annotated tag with source and binary archives.

The documentation is available online and is included in all source and binary archives. See the release notes for new features, caveats and deprecations in the latest release. For more details see the version history.

The master branch is the stable integration branch and should always compile and run on all supported platforms, although details of newly added features may change until they have been included in a release. New features and many bug fixes live in other branches until they are stable enough to merge.

If you are new to GLFW, you may find the tutorial for GLFW 3 useful. If you have used GLFW 2 in the past, there is a transition guide for moving to the GLFW 3 API.

GLFW exists because of the contributions of many people around the world, whether by reporting bugs, providing community support, adding features, reviewing or testing code, debugging, proofreading docs, suggesting features or fixing bugs.

Compiling GLFW

GLFW is written primarily in C99, with parts of macOS support being written in Objective-C. GLFW itself requires only the headers and libraries for your OS and window system. It does not need any additional headers for context creation APIs (WGL, GLX, EGL, NSGL, OSMesa) or rendering APIs (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan) to enable support for them.

GLFW supports compilation on Windows with Visual C++ 2013 and later, MinGW and MinGW-w64, on macOS with Clang and on Linux and other Unix-like systems with GCC and Clang. It will likely compile in other environments as well, but this is not regularly tested.

There are pre-compiled binaries available for all supported compilers on Windows and macOS.

See the compilation guide for more information about how to compile GLFW yourself.

Using GLFW

See the documentation for tutorials, guides and the API reference.

Contributing to GLFW

See the contribution guide for more information.

System requirements

GLFW supports Windows XP and later and macOS 10.8 and later. Linux and other Unix-like systems running the X Window System are supported even without a desktop environment or modern extensions, although some features require a running window or clipboard manager. The OSMesa backend requires Mesa 6.3.

See the compatibility guide in the documentation for more information.

Dependencies

GLFW itself needs only CMake 3.4 or later and the headers and libraries for your OS and window system.

The examples and test programs depend on a number of tiny libraries. These are located in the deps/ directory.

getopt_port for examples with command-line options
TinyCThread for threaded examples
glad2 for loading OpenGL and Vulkan functions
linmath.h for linear algebra in examples
Nuklear for test and example UI
stb_image_write for writing images to disk

The documentation is generated with Doxygen if CMake can find that tool.

Reporting bugs

Bugs are reported to our issue tracker. Please check the contribution guide for information on what to include when reporting a bug.

Changelog since 3.4

Added GLFW_UNLIMITED_MOUSE_BUTTONS input mode that allows mouse buttons beyond the limit of the mouse button tokens to be reported (#2423)

Contact

On glfw.org you can find the latest version of GLFW, as well as news, documentation and other information about the project.

If you have questions related to the use of GLFW, we have a forum.

If you have a bug to report, a patch to submit or a feature you’d like to request, please file it in the issue tracker on GitHub.

Finally, if you’re interested in helping out with the development of GLFW or porting it to your favorite platform, join us on the forum or GitHub.