Editing Infinite loop (section)

===Intentional looping===
There are a few situations when this is desired behavior. For example, the games on cartridge-based game consoles typically have no exit condition in their main loop, as there is no operating system for the program to exit to; the loop runs until the console is powered off.

Modern interactive computers require that the computer constantly be monitoring for user input or device activity, so at some fundamental level there is an infinite processing [[idle loop]] that must continue until the device is turned off or reset. In the [[Apollo Guidance Computer]], for example, this outer loop was contained in the Exec program,<ref>{{cite web
 |url=http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf
 |title=The History of Apollo On-board Guidance, Navigation, and Control
 |author=David Hoag
 |date=September 1976
 |publisher=Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
 |access-date=2020-01-23
 |archive-date=2016-11-05
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161105060425/http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf
 |url-status=live
 }}</ref> and if the computer had absolutely no other work to do, it would loop run a dummy job that would simply turn off the "computer activity" indicator light.

Modern computers also typically do not halt the processor or motherboard circuit-driving clocks when they crash. Instead they fall back to an error condition displaying messages to the operator (such as the [[blue screen of death]]), and enter an infinite loop waiting for the user to either respond to a prompt to continue, or reset the device.

==== Spinlocks ====
[[Spinlock|Spinlocks]] are low-level synchronization mechanisms used in concurrent programming to protect shared resources. Unlike traditional locks that put a thread to sleep when it can't acquire the lock, spinlocks repeatedly "spin" in an infinite loop until the lock becomes available. This intentional infinite looping is a deliberate design choice aimed at minimizing the time a thread spends waiting for the lock and avoiding the overhead of higher level synchronisation mechanisms such as [[Lock (computer science)|mutexes]].

====Multi-threading====
In multi-threaded programs some threads can be executing inside infinite loops without causing the entire program to be stuck in an infinite loop. If the main thread exits, all threads of the process are forcefully stopped, thus all execution ends and the process/program terminates. The threads inside the infinite loops can perform "housekeeping" tasks or they can be in a blocked state waiting for input (from socket/queue) and resume execution every time input is received.