How do I support different OpenGL versions?

Question

I have two different systems one with OpenGL 1.4 and one with 3. My program uses Shaders which are part of OpenGL 3 and are only supported as ARB extension in the 1.4 implementation.

Since I cant use the OpenGL 3 functions with OpenGL 1.4 is there a way to support both OpenGL versions without writing the same OpenGL code twice (ARB/EXT and v3)?

Answer 1

Unless you really have to support 10 year old graphics cards for some reason, I strongly recommend targetting OpenGL 2.0 instead of 1.4 (in fact, I'd even go as far as targetting version 2.1).

Since using "shaders that are core in 3.0" necessarily means that the graphics card must be capable of at least some version of GLSL, this rules out any hardware that is not capable of providing at least OpenGL 2.0. Which means that if someone has OpenGL 1.4 and can run your shaders, he is using 8-10 year old drivers. There is little to gain (apart from a support nightmare) from that.

Targetting OpenGL 2.1 is reasonable, there are hardly any systems nowadays which don't support that (even assuming a minimum of OpenGL 3.2 may be an entirely reasonable choice).

The market price for an entry level OpenGL 3.3 compatible card with roughly 1000x the processing power of a high end OpenGL 1.4 card was around $25 some two years ago. If you ever intend to sell your application, you have to ask yourself whether someone who cannot afford (or does not want to afford) this would be someone you'd reasonably expect to pay for your software.

Having said that, supporting OpenGL 2.x and OpenGL >3.1 at the same time is a nightmare, because there are non-trivial changes in the shading language which go far beyond #define in varying and which will bite you regularly.

Therefore, I have personally chosen to never again target anything lower than version 3.2 with instanced arrays and shader objects. This works with all hardware that can be reasonably expected having the processing power to run a modern application, and it includes the users who were too lazy to upgrade their driver to 3.3, providing the same features in a single code path. OpenGL 4.x features are loadable as extension if available, which is fine.
But, of course, everybody has to decide for himself/herself which shoe fits best.

Enough of my blah blah, back to the actual question:
About not duplicating code for extensions/core, you can in many cases use the same names, function pointers, and constants. However, be warned: As a blanket statement, this is illegal, undefined, and dangerous.
In practice, most (not all!) extensions are identical to the respective core functionality, and work just the same. But how to know which ones you can use and which ones will eat your cat? Look at gl.spec -- a function which has an alias entry is identical and indistinguishable from its alias. You can safely use these interchangeably.
Extensions which are problematic often have an explanatory comment somewhere as well (such as "This is not an alias of PrimitiveRestartIndexNV, since it sets server instead of client state."), but do not rely on these, rely on the alias field.