OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

Compiling a shader

To get started, we need to know how to compile our GLSL shaders. The GLSL compiler is built right into the OpenGL library, and shaders can only be compiled within the context of a running OpenGL program.

OpenGL 4.1 added the ability to save compiled shader programs to a file, enabling OpenGL programs to avoid the overhead of shader compilation by loading precompiled shader programs (see the Saving and loading a shader binary recipe). OpenGL 4.6 added the ability to load shader programs compiled to (or written in) SPIR-V, an intermediate language for defining shaders. See the Loading an SPIR-V shader recipe later in this chapter.

Compiling a shader involves creating a shader object, providing the source code (as a string ...