GLFW is an open source, cross-platform, portable and freely distributed library software that has been designed from the ground up to act as a framework for OpenGL and OpenGL ES application development under Linux, BSD and Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

It is a very easy to use API that provides various functions for accessing OpenGL extensions, opening an OpenGL window, reading mouse, keyboard, joystick and time input, as wel as to synchronize and create reading textures and threads from files.

GLFW comes with built-in support for numerous compilers, including GCC, Cygwin, DJGPP, Borland C++ Builder, Apple Developer Tools, Geek Gadgets, LCC-Win32, MinGW32, Microsoft Visual C++, OpenWatcom, VBCC, and Pelles C.

If you want to install this program on your GNU/Linux system, you will have to download the latest archive from Softpedia, extract it on a location of your choice, open a terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted file and compile the code.

Detailed documentation about how to compile the GLFW library from sources, as well as some examples on how to build programs using this software, is officially provided to developers on the project’s homepage (see link below).

The GLFW library is written entirely in the C and Pascal programming languages, and its target audience are developers who want to develop applications based on the OpenGL and OpenGL ES technologies. Check out the requirements section below to see what software you need to get started with GLFW.

While for GNU/Linux, BSD and Mac OS X, the software is available for download as tarballs, which include the source code of the project, it is distributed as pre-built binary archives for the Microsoft Windows operating system, supporting both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) hardware platforms.