Interoperability

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## Interoperability

Boost.Compute provides a number of facilities to ease interoperability with other C and C++ libraries including OpenGL, OpenCV, Eigen, Qt, and VTK.

All of the interop headers are located in the `<boost/compute/interop/...>` directory.

### OpenGL

OpenGL is a standard API for 3D graphics and closely related to OpenCL.

Boost.Compute provides an easy way to create a shared OpenCL/OpenGL context via the `opengl_create_shared_context()` function. This creates a Boost.Compute `context` object which can be used to create OpenCL memory buffers corresponding to OpenGL memory objects (such as VBOs). This allows for OpenCL kernels to read and write data which is then used directly for rendering with OpenGL.

Boost.Compute provides a few classes to manage OpenGL objects and make them accessible to OpenCL. These include `opengl_buffer` (for OpenGL memory objects) and `opengl_texture` (for OpenGL texture objects).

Control of shared OpenCL/OpenGL memory objects is transfered between OpenCL and OpenGL using the `opengl_enqueue_acquire_gl_objects()` and `opengl_enqueue_release_gl_objects()` functions.

See the OpenCL documentation for the cl_khr_gl_sharing extension for more information.