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by 317070
730 days ago
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The stack traces when something goes wrong are inscrutable under recursion. Same when looking at the program state using debuggers. Fundamentally, the actual state of the program does not match the abstract state used when programming a recursive function. You are recursively solving subproblems, but when something goes wrong, it becomes very hard to reason about all the partial solutions within the whole problem. |
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Hmm. This is a real issue, for the simple case. If tail recursion is not optimized correctly then you end up with a bunch of stack frames, wasted memory...
I propose partially this is a tooling issue, not a fundamental problem with recursion. For tail recursion the frames could be optimized away and a virtual counter employed.
For more complex cases, I'd argue it matters less. Saving on stack frames is still preferable, however this can be acheived with judicious use of inlining. But the looping construct is worse here, as you cannot see prior invocations of the loop, and so have generally no idea of program execution without resorting to log tracing, while even the inlined recusion will provide some idea of the previous execution path.