Compiler is mingw32. Language is C99. OS is windows. Graphics card is Nvidia 260GTX
I can link against opengl32/glu32 and build against it, but nothing from OpenGL 3.x is included... in fact, I would say its probably missing 2.x extensions!
GLEW and GLM are both C++ and doesn't work with straight C. Glee doesn't have any mingw32 binaries (and doesn't build cleanly on my system).
I'm using SDL and that has some OpenGL functions (??), but again, looks way outdated.
I just I don't understand the fundamental problem on why it's so difficult to get C/OpenGL working on windows? Why is is so unique? Why doesn't the Khronos provide an SDK/libraries/headers, etc?
I do OpenGL via Java/lwjgl and takes no time to set it up and get it compiling/running.
In Windows anything above OpenGL-1.1 is only accessible through extensions. This is how it has been designed and how it goes. GLEW works perfectly well with plain C (if I'm not mistaken GLEW is written in plain C).
Khronos cannot provide a SDK because actually providing the OpenGL API is a task left to the operating system vendor and in Windows the graphics drivers are required to provide the implementation. In the case of Windows this is Microsoft, who left the ARB some years ago, in favour of their proprietary Direct3D technology; there used to be heated debates which was the better API, but now that the whole world, except Microsoft settled on OpenGL this time of arguing is over.
Anyway, if you want things to be really easy, instead of GLUT, SDL, etc. use GLFW http://glfw.org, a really excellent OpenGL framework, that does all the hard things for you, does extension loading and OpenGL-3 context setup if you ask it so (you still need some extension wrapper to use extensions in your own code – however creating a pure OpenGL-3 context requires some proxy context, loading a few extensions using that and use the functions obtained to create a real OpenGL-3 context. Just for clarification).