WebGPU should not directly ingest a non-human-writable shading language. This is for a few reasons:

• Consistency: As the language in which humans write shaders changes, the non-human-representation of the language must also change. Similarly, changing the non-human-representation of the language means that a similar change should be made in the language humans are writing. This makes it difficult to evolve WebGPU.
• Ecosystem: Ecosystems exist around humans and the languages they write. There is no large popular repository of shaders in a non-human-readable format.
• Documentation Accuracy: Documentation (à la MDN) will present concepts in the language authors are writing in, not the language the browser ingests. The additional level of indirection between what documentation describes and what the browser is actually doing will make the concepts more difficult to understand for web authors.
• Security: No non-human-writable shading language meets the same security claims as the above human-writable shading language.
• Debugability: Source maps in the only non-human-writable language browsers directly ingest (WebAssembly) still are not implemented in any major browser. Debugging a view of source code, without direct access to the original source, is difficult for browsers to perform.
• Ownership: The WebGPU Community Group does not own any non-human-writable shading languages. Any time the Community Group desires to make a modification to the language, they would need to ask a separate group, perhaps in a separate standards body. Such a process would make it more difficult and slower to modify. Not all of the members of the WebGPU Community Group are present in other standards groups.
• Portability: An additional compile step adds one more place where behavior deviances can occur. The same shader run through different compilers may have different characteristics (either semantic differences or performance differences). Directly ingesting the exact program the author writes means that this whole class of variance is eliminated.