What are the advantages of GLSL's compilation model?
- by Kos
GLSL is fundamentally different from other shader solutions because the server (GPU driver) is responsible for shader compilation. Cg and HLSL are (afaik) generally compiled a priori and sent to the GPU in that way.
This causes some real-world practical issues:
many drivers provide buggy compilers
compilers differ in terms of strictness (one GPU can accept a program while another won't)
also we can't know how the assembler code will be optimised
What are the upsides of GLSL's current approach? Is it worth it?