Instead of doing multiple string comparisons every redraw, why not make an enum for the different shaders?

I assume you are talking about the uniforms. It is a trade-off as far as I can see.

Advantages of enum:

• You dont need to do string comparisons
• You can't accidentally misspell a uniform name

Disadvantages of enum:

• We need to keep track of updating the enum as we write new shaders to cover all names
• We need to create another file and include it everywhere we use shaders

Advantages of string:

• Needs no extra files or structures
• It is immediately clear which uniform it is pointing to

Disadvantages of string:

• Easy to misspell
• Some negligible time is spent on comparing strings (could be bad if we have a lot of uniforms)

It is worth noting that a string comparison takes the equivalent of 0.0001 milliseconds for normal uniform string values though.

I might implement the enum approach now though, I find the argument for it stronger. This commit is pretty rough around the edges still I should note, certainly some stuff to fix, but it's in a separate branch so.