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rswinkle
PortableGL
C2021–2025
rswinkle / PortableGL

PortableGL

An implementation of OpenGL 3.x-ish in clean C

5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An implementation of OpenGL 3.x-ish in clean C

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-12-31 04:51:33 UTC to 2025-10-22 02:28:47 UTC.

0122021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
Yeah PortableGL will never be completely fully featured, not even for OpenGL 3.3 since I'll definitely never do the geometry shader and probably not the transform feedback. But specifically it'll never have the earlier immediate mode stuff, or some of the big 4.0 stuff like the tessellation shaders. I have been meaning to add the DSA functions where they make sense. They'd be really simple to implement. Actually a few days ago someone sent me a pull request adding an interesting project to my README https://github.com/rswinkle/PortableGL/commit/e0652b4dff266d... So now if I were to try to sum up all the OpenGL software implementations I can think of, TinyGL (and modern improved forks) = OpenGL 1.1-1.3 ish osmesa = OpenGL 2.1 using Mesa 7.0.4's swrast PortableGL = OpenGL 3.x-ish Mesa = 2 software renderers still included, gallium based
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softpipe and llvmpipe and I think one or both support the latest OpenGL 4.6 but I could be wrong. swrast and Intel's gallium/llvm based OpenSWR have both been removed from mainline Mesa, and the latter only supports 3.3 core-ish (https://www.openswr.org/) I'm sure there are others out there. I've actually never tried to use "Stand alone" Mesa. I really should to see how it performs if nothing else, but I still say nothing beats the single header library for ease of use.
In Olive.c: a simple graphics library that does not have any dependencies
Not entirely related to the subject of OpenGL, but I really like how the author has decided to lay out this project. It's pretty hard to beat the convenience of a single header (or single header/single source) distribution for C libraries, but library development gets progressively harder as the project gets bigger as more code is added to the (usually hard to navigate) header file. Here, the author does their development with multiple files as one normally would, but when a new version is released they run the generate_gl_h[1] script that concatenates everything into a .h file for distribution. Simple yet flexible! This is also how SQLite[2] distributes its builds. It's a pattern that I'm using myself in some unreleased projects. [1] https://github.com/rswinkle/PortableGL/blob/master/src/gener... [2] https://www.sqlite.org/amalgamation.h
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In PortableGL: An implementation of OpenGL 3.x-ish in clean C

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