glad VS GLFW

Compare glad vs GLFW and see what are their differences.

glad

Multi-Language Vulkan/GL/GLES/EGL/GLX/WGL Loader-Generator based on the official specs. (by Dav1dde)

GLFW

A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input (by glfw)
Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time
  • Mergify - Tired of breaking your main and manually rebasing outdated pull requests?
  • SonarQube - Static code analysis for 29 languages.
glad GLFW
40 72
3,204 11,139
- 2.0%
0.0 0.0
about 1 month ago 10 days ago
C C
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later zlib License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

glad

Posts with mentions or reviews of glad. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-14.

GLFW

Posts with mentions or reviews of GLFW. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-05.
  • LWJGL = SFML vs Allegro vs SDL vs Ogre vs ???
    2 projects | /r/opengl | 5 Jul 2023
    I'm not familiar with LWJGL, my 5 seconds on their website makes me think you might be looking for something like GLFW https://www.glfw.org/ to handle I/O and window creation/management.
  • I have spent two whole work days trying to install GLEW
    6 projects | /r/GraphicsProgramming | 3 Jul 2023
    Consider GLFW3 for windowing and GLAD for function loading. I've used this combination myself successfully. Granted, that is "two things" you need, but OTOH it'll work well.
  • OpenGL (GLFW and GLAD) not linking with cmake
    2 projects | /r/cmake | 30 May 2023
    There is a pattern to it which is usable with every GitHub repository. For example, GLFW v3.3.8 can be fetched from: https://github.com/glfw/glfw/archive/refs/tags/3.3.8.tar.gz
    2 projects | /r/cmake | 30 May 2023
    What exactly would I fetch with this method? He's fetching a raylib url, but I don't really see a pattern in it I can follow when fetching glfw. I assume I can use this repository? https://github.com/glfw/glfw
  • Curseforge Minecraft running on M2?
    2 projects | /r/macgaming | 1 Apr 2023
    I'm not sure how to fix it, sorry. I searched for some of the messages and found this bug: . I think overriding the LWJGL library might fix the issue, but I don't see any way to do that with the CurseForge launcher.
  • GLFW has merged proper support for client-side window decorations on Wayland!
    4 projects | /r/linux | 28 Mar 2023
  • Newbie questions about how to start
    2 projects | /r/VoxelGameDev | 21 Feb 2023
    To go multiplatform with OpenGL / Vulkan (harder for a beginner) you can use a simple window library like GLFW and Dear ImGui for UI. I use these for Avoyd, along with a few other libraries.
  • CMake can't find GLEW
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 20 Feb 2023
    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.16) project(P1_PR) add_executable(P1_PR src/main.cpp ) find_package(GLFW QUIET) if(NOT GLFW_FOUND) message(STATUS "GLFW not found, fetching from GitHub...") include(FetchContent) FETCHCONTENT_DECLARE( GLFW GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/glfw/glfw/ GIT_TAG 3.3.8 ) FetchContent_GetProperties(GLFW) if (NOT GLFW_POPULATED) set(FETCHCONTENT_QUIET NO) FetchContent_Populate(GLFW) set(BUILD_EXAMPLES OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE) set(BUILD_GAMES OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE) add_subdirectory(${glfw_SOURCE_DIR} ${glfw_BINARY_DIR}) endif() endif() find_package(GLEW QUIET) if(NOT GLEW_FOUND) message(STATUS "GLEW not found, fetching from GitHub...") include(FetchContent) FETCHCONTENT_DECLARE( GLEW GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/Perlmint/glew-cmake GIT_TAG glew-cmake-2.2.0 ) FetchContent_GetProperties(GLEW) if (NOT GLEW_POPULATED) set(FETCHCONTENT_QUIET NO) FetchContent_Populate(GLEW) set(BUILD_EXAMPLES OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE) set(BUILD_GAMES OFF CACHE BOOL "" FORCE) add_subdirectory(${glew_SOURCE_DIR} ${glew_BINARY_DIR}) endif() endif() target_include_directories(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE ${GLFW_SOURCE_DIR} PRIVATE ${GLEW_SOURCE_DIR} ) target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} glfw glew32 opengl32 gdi32 glm ) target_compile_features(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE cxx_std_20)
  • ayuda OpengL
    3 projects | /r/programacion | 2 Jan 2023
  • Cursor scaling on Wayland is not there yet
    4 projects | /r/linux | 11 Dec 2022
    I recently started following the Learn OpenGL tutorial and noticed that when I create a window with GLFW in the Wayland GNOME session the cursor becomes much larger when hovering over the window. This is because a Wayland client is expected to define its own pointer (cursor) and that seems to lead to inconsistencies between implementations. I do not have a problem with CSD being default on Wayland (I even prefer it when done really well, like Telegram Desktop, or any GTK app with GtkHeaderBar) but the cursor switching scale while moving it over surfaces (windows) is much more jarring.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing glad and GLFW you can also consider the following projects:

SDL - Simple Directmedia Layer

bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.

glew - The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library

Skia - Skia is a complete 2D graphic library for drawing Text, Geometries, and Images.

glew-cmake - GLEW(https://github.com/nigels-com/glew, source updated nightly) with Cmake and pre-generated sources

OpenSceneGraph - OpenSceneGraph git repository

opengl-imgui-cmake-template - 👾 template repo for getting started with opengl together with imgui using cmake

Ogre 3D - scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine (C++, Python, C#, Java)

imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

Open-Source Vulkan C++ API - Open-Source Vulkan C++ API

SFML - Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming