pyGL is a lightweight utility library, that helps with writing OpenGL graphics in Python. It contains commonly used structures such as buffers or shaders, to speed up development by removing a lot of boilerplate code. pyGL uses hand-written C code to obtain highest performance, while maintaining accessibility.
To install pyGL simply use pip install pyGL in your terminal.
The library requires OpenGL 4.5 to be available on the target machine.
To start using pyGL you have to first initialize the OpenGL bindings:
import pyGL
# create OpenGL context using your library of choice
try
pyGL.init()
except RuntimeError:
# failed to initialize OpenGL bindings
...After that you can start using all goods provided by pyGL.
To ensure high performance pyGL uses Python's buffer protocol to transfer data between Python code and OpenGL.
Objects that support buffer protocols are for example: bytearrays, numpy's arrays, or PyGLM's vectors and matrices.
All functions that accept buffer-like objects are annotated with helper type TSupportsBuffer, which is effectively an alias to collections.abc.Buffer.
Buffer contiguity
If you are passing object that supports buffer protocol, you also have to make sure that the underlying buffer it exposes is C-contiguous. This is requied for us to be able to simply copy buffers data to destination, without employing any conversion methods. In future it might be possible to use buffers whose data is not C-contiguous.
To learn more about Python's buffer contiguity go to [https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-contiguous].
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pyGL allows you to specify OpenGL debug callback function, which can help with troubleshooting graphical errors. Be careful though!
Because we cannot efficiently check is an exception occurred during execution of that function, any errors inside it will be silently
ignored, which may lead to later bugs or even program crash.
If you use debug callback and encounter any bugs it's a good practice to first check if the callback function is written correctly.
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Although pyGL allows transfering data to buffers from any object that supports C-contiguous buffer protocol, to deliver better performance it includes own math library, which exports types like vectors and matrices.
As it's very frequent to use such types in OpenGL operations, all pyGL functions that accept data sources like Shader.set_uniform_vec* or Buffer.store have special fast paths for those types.
We strongly encourage using those types to ensure the best performance.