I just got the news about the OpenGL 4.3 spec, which was released today, and is avail­able at http://www.opengl.org/registry/. The spec doc­u­ment has been reor­ga­nized and cleared up con­sid­er­ably and is a lot eas­i­er to fol­low than the pre­vi­ous spec­i­fi­ca­tions. New fea­tures include (ordered by impor­tance for my projects):

• Queries for inter­nal tex­ture for­mat parameters
• Debug out­put callbacks
• Com­pute shaders
• Tex­ture views
• and oth­ers

I’m cur­rent­ly on a project where com­pat­i­bil­i­ty and scaleabil­i­ty is prime, so the first two fea­tures are very wel­come as devel­op­ment aids to make the code run robust­ly on a vari­ety of plat­forms. Com­pute shaders and tex­ture views are of course cool, but require the newest hard­ware, so they are low­er in my list.

A nice touch by Nvidia to make to expose the new func­tion­al­i­ty as exten­sions on old­er hard­ware.