Routines for drawing a number of geometric primitives (both in solid and wireframe mode) are also provided, including cubes, spheres and the Utah teapot.

Getting started with OpenGL programming while using GLUT often takes only a few lines of code and does not require knowledge of operating system–specific windowing APIs.

The first such library was FreeGLUT, which aims to be a reasonably close reproduction, though introducing a small number of new functions to deal with GLUT's limitations.

OpenGLUT, a fork of FreeGLUT, adds a number of new features to the original API, but work on it ceased in May 2005.

[1] The glut.h header file contains the following license:[2] Some of GLUT's original design decisions made it hard for programmers to perform desired tasks.