I found this while tweaking //impeller/compiler/compiler.cc to test something using a higher SPIRV version than 1.0.
In this case, I had misconfigured the Vulkan version for the SPIRV version I was using. This caused the compiler to fail and not produce any helpful output about why (just saying something like "Compilation failed. 0 error(s), 0 warning(s)").
We should update the check so it prints in this case, e.g. the error message I was seeing indicated an internal error that informed me where the mismatched spirv/environment version was.