[corysama]

In theory, yes. Neither system represents perfection. But, what's more important in practice is the likelihood of problems. Parsing bytecode is trivial. Thus problems with drivers inconsistently rejecting D3D shader bytecode has been relatively rare.

Parsing GLSL is quite hard. Thus, problems with drivers inconsistently rejecting GLSL text has been relatively common.

OpenGL's text requirement makes great sense in theory, but encouraged lots of problems in practice.

[fixermark]

The software engineers who write drivers for graphics hardware have, unfortunately, an ill-earned reputation for being unable to code their way out of wet paper bags.

The fact that the GLSL standard forced every hardware vendor to vend a fully-functional compiler for a C-like language (even a simplified C-like language) is no small part of the source of that reputation.

[corysama]

You know what's great fun? Getting errors that only apply to desktop GLSL when trying to compile valid GLES GLSL. Can you guess how that particular vendor shortcutted implementing their ES compiler for that Android OS revision? Can you guess how likely it is that those Android customers will ever get a driver update? ;P