GLUT is the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs. It implements a simple windowing application programming interface (API) for OpenGL. GLUT makes it considerably easier to learn about and explore OpenGL Programming.

For more information about GLUT see: http://www.opengl.org/developers/documentation/glut.html

However, this changes nothing. The project is still called SLUT, all releases are called SLUT and all functions start with slut, etc.

In the case where you don't include the dynamic library and rely on that the library is available there's a couple of problems; different versions of the dynamic library have on Windows platforms compability problems with programs linked with other versions of the import libraries or linked using non-Microsoft linker (like MinGW).

The solution chosen in SLUT to avoid this is simply to static link the library.
This is of course not the only reason to implement a new library, because this could have been achieved just by making a static version of GLUT.

• Since SLUT is intended to be linked statically, no compability problems with dynamic libraries will occur.
• SLUT is optimized to minimize memory and cpu usage so that the main OpenGL program will get more resources.
• SLUT is also designed to be minimial in size. Resulting in a smaller OpenGL program. And combined with the fact that static linking is used the size will be immensly smaller compared to GLUTs dynamic library.
• SLUT also implements a number long awaited image loading functions that GLUT doesn't.