SDL vs GLUT in opengl 3D programming

Question

I'm beginning a series of tutorials on SDL. Before I dig too far, I'd like to know what type of control SDL gives me over GLUT?

Also, do either support webcam access (for face tracking or motion detection), or is that best managed through OpenCV?

Answer 1

Neither SDL nor GLUT have any facility for webcams. They are completely webcam-agnostic.

As to your other question: GLUT is unmaintained. It has not seen any updates in well over a decade. It has been partially supplanted by FreeGLUT (which is a binary-compatible replacement), but neither GLUT nor FreeGLUT support OpenGL 3.0+. Nor do they have features like sound support.

SDL and many other libraries (like GLFW, SFML, and so on) have support for newer versions of OpenGL, and SDL, SFML, and others have basic audio support.

It's quite safe to consider GLUT and the like as deprecated.