Deprecated OpenGL functions

Question

I am currently learning OpenGL via the 5th Superbible. It teaches you the core profile. But I am really confused.

I know that khronos removed the fixed function pipeline in 3.3 and declared some functions as deprecated. But the Superbible now just replaces those deprecated functions with their own functions.

Why should khronos remove something like glRotate or the matrixstack just so that I have to use 3rd party libraries (or my own) instead of the official ones?

Maybe the superbible is flawed?

Answer 1

glRotate() etc was removed because internally openGL deals with the matrices so it is a cleaner design to just have you supply the matrices directly.

Almost all openGL apps of any complexity are going to be doing a bunch of other matrix stuff anyway and will have their own matrix classes it's easier for openGL to just take the result rather than insist on creating them from a bunch of rotate/translate/scale calls.

They could have supplied their own matrix classes - but there are a lot of 3rd party libs you can use. One of openGL's policies (failings) is that it does rely on 3rd party libs to do anything outside the actual graphics. So beginner programs are a tricky mix of GLUT, GLEW, SDL, etc to get anything on the screen - while DirectX has everything out of the box.