title: Is GLEW mandatory for an up-to-date OpenGL application?
body: <p>I've been reading on the gl.h header file included with my version of Visual Studio and it seems heavily outdated.  </p>
  
  <p>I do not want GLUT or any other middleware/utility library in between to do the dirty work for me, that includes GLEW. Could someone elaborate on why and how does one acquire/query for the modern feature set of the 4.0 specification and what's the idea behind GLEW in general?</p>