If you try 9n**9n**9n in Chrome's console, Chrome breaks (it resembles an infinite loop). Why does this happen?

Question

If you try 9n**9n**9n in Chrome\'s console, Chrome breaks (it resembles an infinite loop).

• Does the V8 engine lack the implementation for this case?

Answer 1

The answer as to why 9**9**9 returns Infinity is because it doesn't take very long to overflow the maximum value (around 2^1024). It might even shortcut it with the ** as see if the first number >= 2 and the second number > 1024, then it will be Infinity.

With BigInt, it can represent much, much larger numbers, so that's what it tries to do. It takes a long time to reach "Infinity" with BigInt (EDIT: which would actually be a RangeError exception). Finding 387420489 can be done pretty quick, but 9n**387420489n, where it is multiplying BigInts almost 400 Million times...that takes a while.

A BigInt operation is much slower than a regular int operation. I expect you might get a result (or a RangeError exception) if you wait 20-30 minutes, but could be much longer.