Usage and API

The function names and general usage are equivalent to C (you can read the GLFW C API documentation here), with some differences outlined bellow.

Naming

The naming conventions follows those of ruby-opengl bindings - all the constants and functions are contained in Glfw module (click for RDoc documentation), in file glfw.so which is loaded by writing

 require 'glfw'

You can also add

 include Glfw

which will export the module‘s functions and constants to the global namespace, so instead of writing

 Glfw.glfwSomeFunction(Glfw::GLFW_SOME_CONSTANT)

in full scope, you can then use the C-like syntax:

 glfwSomeFunction(GLFW_SOME_CONSTANT)

Loading the module will call Glfw.glfwInit function, and will generate ruby exception should the initialization fail. At the end of your program, Glfw.glfwTerminate is automatically called, although you are free to call it yourself if you wish.

Functions working with boolean states are using ruby‘s true/false rather then GL_TRUE/GL_FALSE (both for input and output).

Callbacks

For specifying callback functions just pass ruby Proc object, e.g

 mouse_callback = lambda do |x,y|
  puts "Mouse moved! current mouse position is #{x} #{y}"
 end
 ...
 glfwSetMousePosCallback(mouse_callback)

or convert regular function, as

 def mouse_callback(x,y)
  puts "Mouse moved! current mouse position is #{x} #{y}"
 end
 ...
 glfwSetMousePosCallback(method("mouse_callback").to_proc)

Passing ‘nil’ will disable the callback.

GLFW and GLUT or other windowing libraries

You can combine GLFW with other GL or graphic libraries as long as you use only one of them for window creation/destruction, events callbacks and general window state modifications. For example you can write:

 require 'glfw'
 require 'glut'
 include Glfw,Glut
 ...
 glfwCreateWindow(...) # use GLFW to create OpenGL window
 glutSolidSphere(...)  # use GLUT to draw sphere
 ...

Examples

You can find the examples in the ‘examples’ directory - they are pretty much just conversion of the GLFW C examples. The ‘particles’ example was tuned down for compensation of ruby speed - see the file particles.rb for more details.