> I believe this is because `while(1)` runs so fast that there is no "idle" time for V8 to actually run GC. V8 is a strange beast, and this is just a guess of mine.

Java has (had) weird idiosyncrasies like this as well, well it doesn't crash, but depending on the construct you can get performance degradations depending on how the language inserts safepoints (where the VM is at a knowable state and a thread can be safely paused for GC or whatever).

I don't know if this holds today, but I know there was a time where you basically wanted to avoid looping over long-type variables, as they had different semantics. The details are a bit fuzzy to me right now.