[kristofferc]

For those who only care about the output of fib(20) there are more efficient methods than any of the Julia or Python implementations posted in the link, e.g. lookup tables.

The assumption in benchmarks is of course that the results carry over to other use cases. Here, what is being tested is the overhead in recursion, nothing else. The fact that it happens to be Fibonacci-numbers that is being computed is irrelevant.

[Beltiras]

Isn't that basically what he does when he adds caching? I know it's not a static lookup table but you could prep it by invoking it with a sufficiently large n.

[coldtea]

Why, is anybody restricted to using recursion in their solutions?

[kristofferc]

You are not restricted to recursion, loops, functions etc, but these language constructs might be useful in situations, and therefore the performance (overhead) of these constructs is interesting.