I'm a high schooler who has been self-learning graph algorithms for a month or two now.

I was wondering why the distance array in Dijkstra's algorithm is initialized to infinity (INT_MAX in C++) when it could just be set to a negative number? Since Dijkstra's isn't even used for negative numbers, why isn't the distance array set to some arbitrary negative number (say, -1) and instead a very large number which takes up far more space? It's possible that I'm overestimating the space occupied in memory by a very large INT value.

I'd appreciate any constructive feedback.