setTimeout with infinity delay will execute function immediately

[VdustR]

It's interesting that passing Infinity as delay parameter while setTimeout() called, the function will executed immediately instead of infinity delay.

setTimeout(() => console.log('called'), Infinity)

[initbar]

@VdustR That's really interesting !! I've ran a few more tests and the results are the same:

do you recon the setTimeout implementation automatically sets timeout to zero when something is immeasurable ?

[VdustR]

According to MDN:

Maximum delay value

Browsers including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox store the delay as a 32-bit signed integer internally. This causes an integer overflow when using delays larger than 2147483647 (about 24.8 days), resulting in the timeout being executed immediately.

If browsers store it as a 32-bit signed integer then it's not Infinity anymore.

It's explained that setTimeout receive msec as an Interger in MSDN, too:

msec [in]

Type: Integer Integer that specifies the number of milliseconds.

According to Node.js Timer API:

Note: When delay is larger than 2147483647 or less than 1, the delay will be set to 1.

I also found this in w3.org:

6.3 Timers

When the above methods are to get the timeout, they must run the following steps:

1. Let timeout be the second argument to the method, or zero if the argument was omitted.
2. Apply the ToString() abstract operation to timeout, and let timeout be the result. [ECMA262]
3. Apply the ToNumber() abstract operation to timeout, and let timeout be the result. [ECMA262]
4. If timeout is an Infinity value, a Not-a-Number (NaN) value, or negative, let timeout be zero.
5. Round timeout down to the nearest integer, and let timeout be the result.
6. Return timeout.

As point 4 it mentioned, If timeout is an Infinity value, let timeout be zero.

It's seems like there is some difference between these references (minimum is 1 in node.js and 0 in w3.org).

I have no idea if there is a standard or how the browsers or node.js handle this exactly.

I also found this article about the difference between the browsers in this case:

Environment:

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate build 7600 Browsers:

• IE6
• IE7
• IE8
• Firefox 3.6.9
• Chrome 7.0.517.5 dev
• Safari 5.0.2
• Opera 10.62

Results: Firefox, Chrome and Safari: executed immediately. IE and Opera: never executed

I also tested in some cases:

• Ubuntu 17.04 Firefox 55.0.2 (64-bit)
• Ubuntu 17.04 Google Chrome 60.0.3112.113 (64-bit)
• Ubuntu 17.04 Node.js v8.4.0
• Windows 7 Google Chrome
• Windows 7 IE11

They are all executed immediately.

[github-actions[bot]]

:tada: This issue has been resolved in version 1.17.0 :tada:

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

Your semantic-release bot :package::rocket: