Comment by nice_byte

This part is kind of addressed by having things like SPIR-V - shaders are defined with "bytecode", which itself is produced by a separate compiler. This makes things easier for language designers and driver developers. I don't see a reason why same approach couldn't be implemented in OpenGL. In fact, it would be awesome to have a GL extension for SPIR-V that just adds a corresponding "spirv" bninary format to glShaderBinary