The code is just an infinite loop counter. You can cause all kinds of Safari issues with an infinite loop in JavaScript too, which is sure annoying when trying to figure out large codebases. There was a student in Japan who showed that you could do this trivially and they were arrested.

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StilesCrisis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Blowing up a browser tab with bad JavaScript is not considered to be a problem. But kernel panicking the computer is different--this brings us back to the bad old days of MacOS where a buggy program could force a freeze/restart at any time.

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SahAssar 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Usually you can't freeze the whole system UI with an infinite counter though. I'm pretty sure normal JS browser processes are not supposed to be able to do that.

	▲	LoganDark 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It only froze Safari tabs for me. Not even Safari's own UI except for the web pages themselves. It did do it to all tabs though.

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mikestew 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There's more to it than just a loop. If it was just a loop, it would peg a CPU core and be done with it. But you'll have to reread TFA to find out how it takes out the window server, thus freezing the rest of the system.

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hyperhello 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why does everyone hate this comment? Attitude? I can’t figure out the wavelength here. I’m just commenting.

	▲	StilesCrisis 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Because kernel panics are a wildly different class of bug than breaking one browser tab. An "Oh Snap" is the designed outcome of a JavaScript infinite loop. Crashing the whole computer is not.
	▲	JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Why does everyone hate this comment? "It's just" dismissals are annoying when they're blatantly wrong. An infinite-loop counter in Orion.app shouldn't cause my entire machine to freeze, down to being unable to force quit.
	▲	demibabs 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		"It's just" is usually an annoying way to start a comment.
	▲	LoganDark 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		An infinite loop in JavaScript causes a different issue. It doesn't cause the rest of your tabs to stop working too. Or allegedly the entire rest of the OS though I can't reproduce that.