The first step is to create the shader object using the glCreateShader function. The argument is the type of shader, and can be one of the following: GL_VERTEX_SHADER, GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER, GL_GEOMETRY_SHADER, GL_TESS_EVALUATION_SHADER, GL_TESS_CONTROL_SHADER, or (as of version 4.3) GL_COMPUTE_SHADER. In this case, since we are compiling a vertex shader, we use GL_VERTEX_SHADER. This function returns the value used for referencing the vertex shader object, sometimes called the object handle. We store that value in the vertShader variable. If an error occurs while creating the shader object, this function will return 0, so we check for that and if it occurs, we print an appropriate message and terminate.
Following the creation ...