Call this function before using any other GdkGLExt functions in your applications. It will initialize everything needed to operate the library and parses some standard command line options. argc and argv are adjusted accordingly so your own code will never see those standard arguments. Note This function will terminate your program if it was unable to initialize the library for some reason. If you want your program to fall back to a textual interface you want to call gdk_gl_init_check() instead.
This function does the same work as gdk_gl_init() with only a single change: It does not terminate the program if the library can't be initialized. Instead it returns FALSE on failure. This way the application can fall back to some other means of communication with the user - for example a curses or command line interface.