Loops

[Vengarioth]

Syntax proposal : Loops

Summary

On GPUs loops can quickly cause performance issues by branching or diverging kernels. To avoid such issues xshade limits the power of loop constructs. One of those limitations is the number of iterations needs to be known at compile time.

Examples

for i in 0..16 {
    samples[i] = sample(i);
}

References

• to be added

[BoneCrasher]

Usually the number of iterations will be known in advance!
If not, a redesign of the shader was recommended, since the abort-criteria of an unbound for loop will be another condition-test in most of the cases.

I agree on your proposal, avoiding the above situation preliminarily.