i rewrote it from scratch and it works now
i'm unsure where the error was as the function is the same as well as mostly everything else
the only change was passing the shader handle directly instead of passing a pointer to it as >>144088 said (could that really be an annoyance to opengl?)
>>144088
does it matter which uint i use? i've always been under the impression that i have to use unistd types when i require a certain variable to be of a specific size, in this case the opengl functions i use to get the shaders return GLuint which my IDE informs me is a typedef for a generic unsigned int
>>144106
up until now the iv functions weren't filling up the infoLog array anyway