CABasicAnimation unlimited repeat without HUGE_VALF?

No, this is the way you’re supposed to do it according to the documentation.

Setting this property to HUGE_VALF will cause the animation to repeat forever.

Update for Swift:

HUGE_VALF is not exposed to Swift. However, my understanding from this page is that HUGE_VALF is intended to be infinity (in fact, INFINITY is defined as HUGE_VALF). Since Swift’s FloatingPointType protocol provides a static var infinity, you can simply write

myAnimation.repeatCount = .infinity