[mattj]

I think this neglects a performance consideration: dynamic programming is often simpler for a compiler to optimize, since it's generally a set of nested loops. Sometimes you can vectorize operations, but often you can just exploit locality to keep all the active set in l1 cache (not a compiler optimization per-se).

Memoization, however, is much more of a black-box. Very few compilers will handle the branching present in memoized function calls in the same way they'd handle a loop (which is also a branch, but a more predictable one).

That all being said, memoization is often simpler to reason about and great for infrequent computations.

[rcfox]

This won't help everywhere, but sometimes you can give the compiler a hint that a certain branch is less likely to be taken. The computation branch is going to be slower anyway, and only happen once, so tell the compiler to assume the lookup branch will be taken most of the time.