alt Hacker NewsHistorically, for loops in shaders were limited in the number of iterations they could run for. Among other things this ensures that rasterizing a particular pixel completes in a known amount of time (and ideally that amount of time is fast enough to avoid triggering TDR on windows and making the machine bluescreen). You could of course nest loops so it's not a perfect measure. I'm not certain whether that limitation applies to WebGPU, but it should apply to WebGL.
Historically this was because GPUs didn't have control flow and the compiler had to fully unroll the loop. Once that was lifted, you could have any condition and were only limited by a timeout.