opengl is a mess

wooah. opengl is very badly documented, especially opengl 3.2. you don't know what you are allowed to use and what is deprecated and all libraries mix it at will! i'm going crazy! if i had more time i'd write everything from scratch!

o.O

it would be great if OpenGL ES weren't available for mobile devices only but also on desktop pcs. it's much cleaner.

so with opengl es there are no twenty ways to achieve the very same thing, without performance comparisons available? i mean, honestly, there are like TWENTY ways to draw a mesh.

Yep. But the best way is to draw everything with shaders. You can use an existing OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer, all commands should also work with OpenGL 3.2 (excluding some vendor specific extensions)

so if OpenGL ES basically is a cleaned up subset of OpenGL maybe it's best to simply use OpenGL ES documentation? if there is any good documentation.

well, I already render everything with shaders but then again there are two ways to stream your data to the gpu, one via the glVertexPointer-thingy and the other one separately via glVertexAttribPointer. now, if you're using vbos it's getting interesting. the pointer then is an offset to the starting point of the buffer. therefore you have to bind the buffer. but do you also have to bind the shader program? and which kind of buffer do they mean, anyway? normal GL_VERTEX_ARRAY-buffers or glGenVertexArray or... i mean, seriously, why is there glGenBuffers and glGenVertexArray if you can pass a GL_VERTEX_ARRAY to glGenBuffers? o.O

The specification clearly specifies what is deprecated and what is not. Also usually you can find the full documentation for a feature by googling by its extension string. Like GL_EXT_framebuffer_object or something. Also, follow tutorials and check the opengl wiki.

well, the problem is not opengl itself. i'm trying to incorporate qt but i feel that it is a very unfinished product as of yet. there are some classes which make it nearly impossible to write opengl 3 conform code.