About Infinity

I’m not saying that it is easy to define infinity. But if you are using an API - for instance in an embedded device - you might want to consider if your own definition of infinity is the same as the definition of the API.

A real life example

Your API defines infinity as int32.Maxvalue in milliseconds. Before we use this somewhere we expect it to run for years let’s do a simple calculation:

int32.Maxvalue is equal to 2,147,483,647 . So that means that the API infinity is: 2,147,483,647 ms / (1000 ms/s * 60 s/min * 60 min/h * 24 h/day) =~ 24 days. Well depending on you use case that may be a very short infinity.