I've been programming opengl using glut as my window handler, lately i've been thinking if there are any advantages to switching to an alternate window handler such as wxWidgets or qt.
Are there any major differences at all or is it just a matter of taste? Since glut provides some additional functions for opengl-programming beyond the window handling features, would there be a point in combining an additional toolkit with glut?
I can only speak from experiential of using QT:
Once you have the basic structure set up then it is a simple case of doing what you have always done: for example, the project I am working on at the moment has an open gl widget embedded in the window.
This widget has functions such as initializeGL, resize...paintGL etc. Advantages include the ability to pass variables to an from the other windows / widgets etc. QT also has additional functions for handelling mouse clicks and stuff (great for 2d stuff, 32d stuff requires some more complex maths)
Well - glut is okay to get a prototype going.
It depends on the OS, but later on you may want to prevent the screen-saver from starting, you may want to disable the task switch (only the bad guys do this though), You may want to react to power down events. You may find out that glut can't deal with dead-keys on one or another operation system, or, or, or... There are thousand reasons why you may want to get rid of it.
It's a framework designed to make the start easy and do 90% of the usual stuff you need, but it can never do 100%. You can always hack yourself into glut or lift the init-code, but one day you will find out that it's easier to redesign the init-code from scratch and adjust it to your task.
Opening a window and initializing OpenGL is not rocket-science . Use glut as long as it works for you, but as soon as it makes problems get rid of it. It'll take you just a hand full of hours, so you won't loose much.
For a toy project glut is the way to go though.
You need to move from glut as soon as you want more complex controls and dialogs etc.
QT has an excellent openGL widget there is also an interesting article in the newsletter about drawing controls ontop of GL to give cool WPF style effects.
wxWidgets also comes with an opengl example but I don't have much experience of it.
SDL, while not just a window handler, will make it easier to use OpenGL than raw Win32 code. However, my experience with Qt, GTK and wxWidgets has not been too bad... certainly not that much better than Win32, its probably a matter of taste in those cases.
I'd recommend avoiding widgets and wrappers like GLUT if you want a fine level of control over the window and resources, but if you are just looking for speed of development then these tools are ideal.