I am finding something very strange with the with the Mesa 10.6 GLSL linker.
Compiling my GLSL code takes 63 ms but linking it takes a massive 90,000 ms ! Yes, that’s a minute and a half. The shader code then works just fine, but what the hell is the Mesa linker doing? I gather that the linking stage is more complex than traditional C code linking because certain error messages, that one might expect from the compiler, are emitted by the linker.
On another platform, using the same program and the same GLSL code but the Nvidia 346 driver compiling takes 30 ms and linking takes 12 ms.