OpenGLAda

Project Status: I do not have the time and energy to maintain this project anymore. Both this project and the corresponding Alire crates are unmaintained. I would be okay with someone taking over the project, feel free to contact me about it.

About

OpenGLAda is a thick Ada binding for OpenGL and related C libraries (GLFW, FreeType). It enables you to create complex graphical applications in Ada using the OpenGL industry standard.

Highlights

• Strong typing: Thanks to extensive usage of Ada’s type system, using the API is much less error-prone than it is in C.
• Dynamic run-time loading of OpenGL functions: OpenGLAda will link properly against OpenGL 1.1 because all functions that were introduced in OpenGL 1.2 or later are loaded at run-time. Functions will also automatically be loaded as ARB or EXT function if available.
• Object-oriented design: All OpenGL objects are wrapped as tagged types. They are also reference-counted, so you do not need to worry about freeing memory yourself.
• Cross-Platform: OpenGLAda supports macOS, Windows and X11-based operating systems like Linux.
• Structured: In contrast to the raw OpenGL library, OpenGLAda’s functionality is structured into packages, so you have a better overview over the functionality of the API.
• Automatic exception handling: By default, every OpenGLAda checks after every OpenGL call whether an error flag has been set, and raises the corresponding exception if that’s the case. This makes debugging easier. (You can turn off this feature completely at compile-time.)
• Batteries included: Besides raw OpenGL, OpenGLAda also wraps GLFW 3 for window creation and user input and FreeType for text rendering with OpenGL. It includes the Generic Image Decoder for loading image files into textures. These additional libraries are optional; you do not have to use them.

Setting it up

The preferred way to use OpenGLAda in your project is to use Alire. OpenGLAda provides the following Alire crates:

• openglada: Core
• openglada_glfw: GLFW binding
• openglada_images: Image loading
• openglada_text: Text rendering

You can also fetch releases of these crates from the GitHub repository.

License

OpenGLAda is distributed under the terms of the MIT License.

Related Projects

OpenGLAda is not the first attempt to create an OpenGL binding for Ada. Other bindings are:

• AdaOpenGL: Probably the first open-source binding that has been developed. It’s rather thin and has seen its last update in 2003. Like OpenGLAda, it includes GLFW bindings.
• Globe3D: A 3D engine in Ada based on OpenGL. The included OpenGL binding is decent and up-to-date, but also rather thin.
• Orka: This project uses parts of OpenGLAda.