GLUT is a windowing library. GLFW3, SDL, SFML mostly replace everything it does in terms of windowing and input.

:)

It would be an interesting comparison, yeah. I haven't worked with CUDA much lately though. I was thinking of adding CUDA support so that Chlorine would default to CUDA on Nvidia cards, but it seemed of limited value. The real goal is 1) portability and 2) ease of use, rather than absolute performance.

I was contemplating doing a FFT as a demo, but Mandelbrot was low hanging fruit that made for pretty pictures. Keep in mind this was student work.

If you have a specific problem in mind, I'd be happy to work on adding it as an example.

I'm in search of my first "customer" so to speak. :)

Above I was suggesting additions to the existing demo, the straightforward computation of Mandelbrot membership isn't how you would really do it if you care about performance or accuracy.

Do any of those modifications appeal? I understand it was student work, but everything I suggested is fairly straightforward.

They certainly do appeal, but are likely a little outside my expertise to go implement, at least right now. Definitely something I'll look into, time permitting!

I was aiming more for "simpler" to start with I think.

I think the problem with (most of?) these libraries is that they don't solve the fundamental problem, which is: the OpenCL API is awful to work with. Various strategies have been attempted, mainly involving some form of "wrap the C API in less verbose C++!"

Sorry to keep plugging my stuff, but you might be interested in this ... https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine

No raw pointers, but you can use C arrays (was that what you meant by raw pointers?).

I wrote this blog post a while ago, and decided to revisit it over the weekend to generate/add some benchmarking data. Figured I'd post it here and see if anyone has any feedback.

I wrote something similar a while back (https://github.com/Polytonic/Chlorine). Always good to see more attention paid to OpenCL though!

I recently put together Glitter (https://github.com/Polytonic/Glitter) which is a basic OpenGL boilerplate that runs on every platform. The only dependency is cmake, so getting started with OpenGL is as simple as generating an IDE project file or makefile and pressing play. No messing with compilers or linkers required. :)

I've spent a significant amount of time learning both OpenGL and WebGL, and I have to say, there is significant value in starting with OpenGL first. For starters, the GLSL compiler is much friendlier. There are also merits to understanding the state-machine from a "C" perspective.