While most times I'd agree with yckx on the assimp thing, I think for a demo it's rather bulky. It contains WAY too many functions and formats. I say, find a format that you want and look for a library that specializes in it. It will be smaller and, in most cases, faster.

Assimp is pretty simple to use and with a unique interface you have lots of format in your hands. Once I thought as sethhope, but the time i spend to find and get working some specialized lib (not to say to write my own parser...) is at the end greater than the time to download, install and use assimp. And, more, the assimp work has to be done only once, and you can get rid of the problem of loading a mesh in every other project.

As for the speed I quote setthope: assimp seems a bit slow in effect.

As for the speed I quote setthope: assimp seems a bit slow in effect.

The speed of the first loader shouldn't be an issue, in that a better approach is to convert files to a convenient format that will load quickly. I.e., use assimp to load files, convert the files to a fast-loading format and save those files for (later) loading into an app that needs them.

If you have doubts about an OBJ loader then don't use it.

I second suggestions about using ASSIMP. Why?

Because work put in ASSIMP interfacing, even for a demo, is work invested in a library you're going to use. By contrast, you will drop OBJ support a day. It gets quite some mileage but it's just insufficient for modern uses and BTW, the real OBJ format includes nontrivial stuff such as NURBS usually not supported by easygoing file loaders.