Learning openGL on the mac: GLUT or native windowing system?

I'm starting to learn openGL on the mac, 开发者_Go百科and being a cocoa developer already I find the native windowing system to be very appealing.

The books I'm reading all mentions the use of GLUT. Now, I'm wondering what the majority of people use for developing opengl programs, or if it's just a matter of taste.

Generally (Free)GLUT is not used for developing actual applications. It's used for demoing effects or simple things, which is why so many online materials use it. It takes all the cross-platform stuff and shoves it into a corner, thus focusing the user's attention on OpenGL.

GLUT owns the message processing loop. For simple applications, that's fine. But for most real programs, you will need to control message processing on your own. So GLUT fails. Also, GLUT doesn't really mesh well with the rest of the UI; it has no facilities for creating GUI controls (except for context menus).

If you're learning OpenGL, then you should be focused on learning OpenGL, not GUI programming. So use what makes sense for the task in question.