[phleet]

It's a lot harder to reason about memory constraints on recursive programs.

The clearness and correctness of the code often ignores the possibility for stack overflow. Most naive implementations of DFS will hit the stack limit given trees that are all one long path from a single root to a single leaf.

[mturmon]

Further to your point, here's the guideline, and rationale, from Gerard Holzmann's document on recommended coding practices for C at NASA/JPL:

1. Rule: Restrict all code to very simple control flow constructs – do not use goto statements, setjmp or longjmp constructs, and direct or indirect recursion.

Rationale: Simpler control flow translates into stronger capabilities for verification and often results in improved code clarity. The banishment of recursion is perhaps the biggest surprise here. Without recursion, though, we are guaranteed to have an acyclic function call graph, which can be exploited by code analyzers, and can directly help to prove that all executions that should be bounded are in fact bounded. (Note that this rule does not require that all functions have a single point of return – although this often also simplifies control flow. There are enough cases, though, where an early error return is the simpler solution.)

This is rule 1 of 10, so he apparently feels strongly about "banishing recursion." Gerard was formerly at Bell Labs and is also a fellow of the ACM and a member of the NAE.

[flogic]

It's also important to note that these rules are made for critical control systems that tend to be low level. The cost benefit trade offs aren't going to be the same as in typical business software.