[ANTSANTS]

It's a bit of an understatement that hardware vendors aren't known for being very good at software. NVidia and AMD aren't so bad, but look at how awful the mobile GPU vendors are: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2013/09/26/dolphin-emulator-and...

That's what made it a bad decision to compile the entire shader in the driver. They are incompetent, and the ARB picked a design that exacerbated their incompetence instead of working around it. Users don't care why their OpenGL implementation has bugs, they just care that it does.

[amaranth]

The 'lore', if you will, around this decision is that 3dfx pushed for GLSL being handled in the driver instead of a bytecode model because they had the best driver developers so would have a clear advantage. Who knows if that was actually their reasoning, perhaps they just wanted the flexibility?