What was Blender created in?

Question

Does Blender use OpenGl or DirectX? Or is it all done from scratch?

Answer 1

Does Blender use OpenGl or DirectX?

All graphics output of Blender is done using OpenGL.

Or does it use a programming language (python?) to do everything from scratch?

Why "or"? An API doesn't substitute a programming language. Blender has been programmed in C, C++ and Python. OpenGL is used to render everthing on screen, including the user interface.

Answer 2

You can look at the blender source code and see it's written in both python and C/C++ -- less python, more C. OpenGL is referenced frequently in the code, while DirectX only rarely. So there ya go.

Answer 3

Expanding on what datenwolf said. Blender for the majority was written in C, the Game Engine was written in C++ and the entire application has Python bindings (meaning you can use python within the application). Blender uses OpenGL and has a special engine (comprised of opengl calls and functionality, mostly legacy but pushing to use modern stuff, vbos etc) that is used to draw the interface and power its 3d capabilities called GHOST.

Answer 4

For such questions I found ohloh to be useful. It is a site which generates statistics on open source projects. One of the statistics is a list of different programming languages used in the project. You can look at the statistics for Blender here. ohloh is also useful for identifying the tools a project used and/or to compare to similar projects.