The GLV library provides a small, cross-platform, C interface for creating a window or fullscreen display with an OpenGL context. It was written for use in games and demos as an alternative to larger libraries such as GLUT, SDL, GLFW, PLIB, etc. There are no thread, joystick, or timer wrappers here.

The library is made available under the MIT License and the implementation for Linux & Windows is a single source file to facilitate copying directly into your own projects.

The currently supported systems are Android, Linux (X11), and Windows. The Linux version is the most complete and gets the most testing. The Mac version is obsolete as it has not been updated for Cocoa.

The small size of GLV relative to alternatives can be seen on the following chart:

Linux x86_64 Shared Libraries

Bytes	Library Version
32480	GLV 0.5
286752	GLFW 3.3
369088	GLUT 3.11.1
1503144	Allegro 5.2.10
1935080	SDL 2.26.3

Requirements

For Linux install the OpenGL and X11 development packages.

Fedora:

sudo dnf install libglvnd-devel libXcursor-devel libXxf86vm-devel

Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libgl-dev libxcursor-dev libxxf86vm-dev

The X11 version is built without the XFree86 XF86VidMode extension by default, but this can be enabled in the Makefile by defining USE_XF86VMODE.

Installation

Linux

To use in source form copy these three files into your project:

x11/glv.c x11/glv.h x11/glv_keys.h

To build a shared library run the following commands:

make -C x11
make -C examples -f Makefile.linux
sudo make -C x11 install

Windows

To use in source form copy these three files into your project:

win32/glv.c win32/glv.h win32/glv_keys.h

To build a shared library run the following commands from the command prompt:

cd win32
nmake
cd ..\examples
nmake -f Makefile.vc

Android

Add the android source and header files to your project.