OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

An Overview of the OpenGL Shading Language

This section provides an overview of the shading language used within OpenGL. GLSL shares many traits with C++ and Java, and is used for authoring shaders for all the stages supported in OpenGL, although certain features are only available for particular types of shaders. We will first describe GLSL’s requirements, types, and other language constructs that are shared between the various shader stages, and then discuss the features unique to each type of shader.