The optical wireless communication channel is complex and changeable. Fountain codes as an emerging rateless coding can achieve adaptive transmission in different channel environments without a priori information of the channel. Compared with traditional coding, it can improve the quality of wireless transmission. In this paper, we first summarize the advantages of fountain codes applied to optical wireless communication and the domestic and foreign researches on the development status of fountain codes. Then we deeply study the design of two kinds of fountain codes coding schemes, as well as the degree distribution function which has significant influence on the performance of fountain code. Soon we put forward one kind of fountain codes, namely Luby transform (LT) codes, and introduce the optimization schemes in recent years. Meanwhile, the key difficulties that need to be solved in the fountain codes design are pointed out. Finally, the necessary technologies and explorations direction of fountain codes for wireless optical communication are proposed.