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 is written primarily in C99, with parts of macOS support being written in Objective-C.

GLFW supports Windows, macOS and Linux, and also works on many 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 and macOS binaries. There are release tags with source and binary archives attached for every version since 3.0.

The documentation is available online and is also included in source and binary archives, except those generated automatically by Github. The documentation contains guides, a tutorial and the API reference. The release notes list the new features, caveats and deprecations in the latest release. The version history lists every user-visible change for every release.

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.

System requirements

GLFW supports Windows 7 and later and macOS 10.11 and later. On GNOME Wayland, window decorations will be very basic unless the libdecor package is installed. Linux and other Unix-like systems running X11 are supported even without a desktop environment or modern extensions, although some features require a clipboard manager or a modern window manager.

See the compatibility guide for more detailed information.

Compiling GLFW

GLFW supports compilation with Visual C++ (2013 and later), GCC and Clang. Both Clang-CL and MinGW-w64 are supported. Other C99 compilers will likely also work, but this is not regularly tested.

There are pre-compiled binaries available for Windows and macOS.

GLFW itself needs only CMake and the headers and libraries for your operating system and window system. No other SDKs are required.

See the compilation guide for more information about compiling GLFW and the exact dependencies required for each window system.

The examples and test programs depend on a number of tiny libraries. These are bundled in the deps/ directory. The repository has no submodules.

• 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 when the library is built, provided CMake could find a sufficiently new version of it during configuration.

Using GLFW

See the HTML documentation for a tutorial, guides and the API reference.

Contributing to GLFW

See the contribution guide for more information.

The master branch is the stable integration branch and should always compile and run on all supported platforms. Details of a newly added feature, including the public API, may change until it has been included in a release.

The latest branch is equivalent to the highest numbered release, although it may not always point to the same commit as the tag for that release.

The ci branch is used to trigger continuous integration jobs for code under testing and should never be relied on for any purpose.

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)
• Added glfwGetEGLConfig function to query the EGLConfig of a window (#2045)
• Added glfwGetGLXFBConfig function to query the GLXFBConfig of a window (#1925)
• Updated minimum CMake version to 3.16 (#2541)
• Removed support for building with original MinGW (#2540)
• [Win32] Removed support for Windows XP and Vista (#2505)
• [Win32] Bugfix: Media keys were reported with a scancode of 256 (#1768,#2417,#2625)
• [Cocoa] Added QuartzCore framework as link-time dependency
• [Cocoa] Removed support for OS X 10.10 Yosemite and earlier (#2506)
• [Cocoa] Bugfix: Cmd+Period, Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Esc key events were not emitted (#1362,#2278)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: The fractional scaling related objects were not destroyed
• [Wayland] Bugfix: glfwInit would segfault on compositor with no seat (#2517)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: A drag entering a non-GLFW surface could cause a segfault
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Ignore key repeat events when no window has keyboard focus (#2727)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Reset key repeat timer when window destroyed (#2741,#2727)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Memory would leak if reading a data offer failed midway
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Retrieved cursor position would be incorrect when hovering over fallback decorations
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Fallback decorations would report scroll events
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Keyboard repeat events halted when any key is released (#2568)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Fallback decorations would show menu at wrong position
• [Wayland] Bugfix: The cursor was not updated when clicking through from a modal to a fallback decoration
• [Wayland] Bugfix: The cursor position was not updated when clicking through from a modal to the content area
• [Wayland] Bugfix: free modules at end of terminate function to resolve potential segmentation fault (#2744)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Confining or disabling the cursor could segfault on compositors without pointer-constraints-unstable-v1
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Key repeat did not function on very old compositors
• [Wayland] Bugfix: The libwayland-client library was not unloaded at termination
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Scroll events were sent twice on some versions of GNOME (#2494)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Two-dimensional scroll input was emitted as separate axes
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Mouse wheel scroll distance was incorrect on some compositors
• [Wayland] Bugfix: glfwSwapBuffers would halt with nonzero swap interval when window was suspended (#1350,#2582,#2640,#2719,#2723,#2800,#2827)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: glfwPostEmptyEvent would leak a callback proxy (#2836)
• [Wayland] Bugfix: glfwHideWindow did not always send its request immediately
• [Wayland] Bugfix: Some event types were not always processed by glfwPollEvents or glfwWait*Events (#2793,#2795)
• [X11] Bugfix: Running without a WM could trigger an assert (#2593,#2601,#2631)
• [X11] Bugfix: Occasional crash when an idle display awakes (#2766)
• [X11] Bugfix: Prevent BadWindow when creating small windows with a content scale less than 1 (#2754)
• [X11] Bugfix: Clamp width and height to >= 1 to prevent BadValue error and app exit
• [X11] Bugfix: Floating windows silently became non-floating when hidden (#2276)
• [X11] Bugfix: The libXext library was not unloaded at termination
• [Linux] Bugfix: The header for ioctl was only implicitly included (#2778)
• [Null] Added Vulkan 'window' surface creation via VK_EXT_headless_surface
• [Null] Added EGL context creation on Mesa via EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless
• [EGL] Allowed native access on Wayland with GLFW_CONTEXT_CREATION_API set to GLFW_NATIVE_CONTEXT_API (#2518)

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.