The article does mention Vulkan: Direct3D and the next generation of graphics APIs—Mantle, Metal, and Vulkan—clean up some of the mess by using a bytecode to s

The article does mention Vulkan: Direct3D and the next generation of graphics APIs—Mantle, Metal, and Vulkan—clean up some of the mess by using a bytecode to ship shaders instead of raw source code. But pre-compiling shader programs to an IR doesn’t solve the fundamental problem: the interface between the CPU and GPU code is needlessly dynamic, so you can’t reason statically about the whole, heterogeneous program.