OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Creating and Allocating Buffers

As with many things in OpenGL, buffer objects are named using GLuint values. Values are reserved using the glGenBuffers() command. This function has already been described in Chapter 1, but we include the prototype here again for handy reference.

void glGenBuffers(GLsizei n, GLuint *buffers);

Returns n currently unused names for buffer objects in the array buffers.

After calling glGenBuffers(), you will have an array of buffer object names in buffers, but at this time, they’re just placeholders. They’re not actually buffer objects—yet. The buffer objects themselves are not actually created until the name is first bound to one of the buffer binding points on the context. This is important because OpenGL may ...