[gitgud]

Well you can easily detect trivial examples like "while(1)" and "for(i=0;true;i++)". But otherwise how would know some is an infinite loop?

Put a bit more simply, to work out if a problem is unsolvable (infinitly looping) you need to evaluate the problem... By trying to solve it. Checkout the halting problem for more details.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

[teraflop]

"Solving" infinite loops doesn't necessarily mean accurately predicting a priori whether a piece of code will terminate. It can just mean ensuring that if the code does try to run indefinitely, it doesn't have unfortunate effects such as blocking the UI thread without the possibility of being interrupted.

[gitgud]

> It can just mean ensuring that if the code does try to run indefinitely, it doesn't have unfortunate effects such as blocking the UI thread without the possibility of being interrupted.

Well that can be achieved by executing the code in a background worker thread. Which doesn't affect the UI thread in browsers... no sure how it's managed but I think you could terminate it after a certain amount of time too

[angleofrepose]

> ctrl-C functionality

OS implementations dont solve the halting problem. I agree with the sibling comment.