this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
31 points (91.9% liked)
Programming
17576 readers
136 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Generally, some algorithms are more easily expressed as recursive functions than iterative loops. ...and vice versa. And realistically, that's how you should choose ninety nine percent of the time.
But if you want to get into the weeds... Prefer iteration unless you know one or more of the following:
Because in environments where none of the above are true, iterative solutions are usually more performant, safer, and better understood.
Perfect answer.
Just to nitpick but the compiler/interpreter needs to support tail-call recursion, not just the language. For example, tail-call recursion is part of the language spec for JavaScript (ECMAScript 6), but only certain engines actually support it (https://compat-table.github.io/compat-table/es6/ Ctrl+F
tail call).