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 natively supports Windows, macOS and Linux and other Unix-like systems. On Linux both X11 and Wayland are supported.
GLFW is licensed under the zlib/libpng license.
You can download the latest stable release
as source or Windows binaries, or fetch the latest
branch from GitHub. Each
release starting with 3.0 also has a corresponding annotated
tag with source and binary archives.
The documentation is available online and is included in all source and binary archives. See the release notes for new features, caveats and deprecations in the latest release. For more details see the version history.
The master
branch is the stable integration branch and should always compile
and run on all supported platforms, although details of newly added features may
change until they have been included in a release. New features and many bug
fixes live in other branches until
they are stable enough to merge.
If you are new to GLFW, you may find the tutorial for GLFW 3 useful. If you have used GLFW 2 in the past, there is a transition guide for moving to the GLFW 3 API.
GLFW itself requires only the headers and libraries for your OS and window system. It does not need the headers for any context creation API (WGL, GLX, EGL, NSGL, OSMesa) or rendering API (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan) to enable support for them.
GLFW supports compilation on Windows with Visual C++ 2010 and later, MinGW and MinGW-w64, on macOS with Clang and on Linux and other Unix-like systems with GCC and Clang. It will likely compile in other environments as well, but this is not regularly tested.
There are pre-compiled Windows binaries available for all supported compilers.
See the compilation guide for more information about how to compile GLFW yourself.
See the documentation for tutorials, guides and the API reference.
See the contribution guide for more information.