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GLSL (Graphics Language Shading Language) is an abbreviation for the official OpenGL Shading Language. GLSL is a high-level programming language that’s similar to C/C++ for several parts of the graphics card. With GLSL, you can code short programs, called shaders, which are executed on the GPU.
A shading language is a special programming language adapted to easily map on shader programming. Those kinds of languages usually have special data types such as color and normal. Because of the various target markets of 3D graphics, different shading languages have been developed.