See doc/index.html for more information. If you downloaded the tarball from the GLEW website, you just need to: Unix: make extensions make sudo -s make install make clean Windows: use the project file in build/vc12/ If you wish to build GLEW from scratch (update the extension data from the net or add your own extension information), you need a Unix environment (including wget, perl, and GNU make). The extension data is regenerated from the top level source directory with: make extensions An alternative to generating the GLEW sources from scratch is to download a pre-generated (unsupported) snapshot: https://sourceforge.net/projects/glew/files/glew/snapshots/