Shader can't be compiled

Question

I'm following book "OpenGL Programming Guide 8th Edition". I just want to run the first program introduced in the book on my Mac.

It's Mavericks + Xcode 4.6.1 + Intel HD graphics 4000. So the problem is, the shader can't be compiled.

Shader codes:

#version 410 core

layout(location = 0) in vec4 vPosition;

void
main()
{
    gl_Position = vPosition;
}

And the error message is:

Shader compilation failed: ERROR: 0:1: '' :  version '410' is not supported
ERROR: 0:1: '' : syntax error #version
ERROR: 0:3: 'layout' : syntax error syntax error

I tried version 420/400/330, none of them works.

By the way, the program uses latest glew 1.10(http://glew.sourceforge.net), and I found that I have to set "glewExperimental = GL_TRUE;" before calling glewInit. Otherwise "glGenVertexArray" is a NULL pointer. So I'm wondering maybe glew doesn't support Mavericks?

Answer 1

MacOS uses Legacy Profile as default for all created OpenGL context. Therefor by default only OpenGL up to 2.1 and GLSL up to 1.20 is supported.

To use OpenGL 3.2+ you need to switch to the Core Profile. The naming there is a little bit confusing because it stats only 3.2Core profile, but actually this 3.2 or later (every OpenGL profile that is supported by the system/driver that is backwards compatible to 3.2)

For glut (depends on the version of glut if it works) the command on MacOS is:

glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_3_2_CORE_PROFILE | ...  )

Where | ... would be the other options you want to pass to glutInitDisplayMode.

About glew, normally you don't require glew on MacOS due the way how the OpenGL layer is implemented in MacOS. You are restricted to the OpenGL features MacOS provides/exposes. So either the features are available via the headers of MacOS or not. There header would be #include <OpenGL/gl3.h> where also the naming is missleading, it does not mean only OpenGL 3, it is the same like with the context.

I would recommend to use GLFW it is a great cross platform library similar to GLUT but as I think better to use. There you would switch the context like this:

 glfwWindowHint(GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MAJOR, 3);
 glfwWindowHint(GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MINOR, 2);
 glfwWindowHint(GLFW_OPENGL_PROFILE, GLFW_OPENGL_CORE_PROFILE);
 glfwWindowHint(GLFW_OPENGL_FORWARD_COMPAT, GL_TRUE);