[rjmunro]

I don't think the representation of shaders as strings vs bytecode is a problem at the low level. Strings are slightly inefficient, but you could just pretend that they are bytecode, where the bytes are all restricted to the ASCII range.

What is required is a language where the compiler can analyse the code and decide what to do on the CPU and what to do on the GPU as part of it's optimisation. It could even emit different versions for different CPU / GPU combinations or JIT compile on the target machine once it knows what the actual capabilities are (maybe in some cases it makes sense to do more on the CPU if the GPU is less powerful). You could possibly also run more or even all code on the CPU to enable easier debugging.

The language could be defined at high enough level that it can be statically analysed and verified, which I think would answer the criticisms in the article.