GLUS - Modern OpenGL Utilities

June 28, 2026 · View on GitHub

GLUS is a cross-platform utility library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenVG. It provides window/context creation, math helpers, image and model loading, shader utilities and more. GLUS lives in its own repository and is used by the McNopper/OpenGL examples.

Changelog

v1.0.1

Fixed two sign errors in the band-3 spherical-harmonics rotation (glusSHBuildRotation3f) that made the band-3 matrix non-orthogonal. Verified (orthogonality, group homomorphism, equivariance) against andrewwillmott/sh-lib.
Documented the SH rotation basis/convention in glus_sh.h (standard real SH; bridge to the Inria/3DGS/glTF sign convention via the Condon-Shortley phase).

v1.0.0

Initial public release.

Prerequisites

CMake 3.14 or higher - Download CMake
C/C++ Compiler:
- Windows: Visual Studio 2013 or newer (MSVC)
- Linux: GCC or Clang
- macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (Clang)
Git - For fetching dependencies
OpenGL 3.2+ compatible graphics driver

Building (standalone)

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

This produces the static library lib/GLUS.lib (or lib/libGLUS.a on Linux/macOS).

Using GLUS in another project

GLUS can be consumed directly via CMake FetchContent:

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
    glus
    GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/McNopper/GLUS.git
    GIT_TAG        main
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(glus)

target_link_libraries(your_target PRIVATE GLUS)

Dependencies

For the desktop OpenGL build, the following are automatically fetched and built via CMake FetchContent - no manual installation required:

GLFW 3.4 - https://github.com/glfw/glfw - window and input management
GLEW 2.2.0 - https://github.com/Perlmint/glew-cmake - OpenGL extension loading

When GLUS is added to a parent project that already provides these targets, the existing ones are reused instead of being fetched again.

OpenGL ES / OpenVG

OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0/3.1 and OpenVG builds are selected via the OpenGL CMake variable (e.g. -DOpenGL=ES2, -DOpenGL=ES, -DOpenGL=ES31). An Android NDK build is available under Android/jni.

Documentation

API documentation can be generated with Doxygen:

cd docs
doxygen Doxyfile

The HTML output is written to docs/html.

Yours Norbert Nopper