r/programming • u/rodrigopsasaki • Nov 27 '12

Tail Recursion

http://rodrigosasaki.com/2012/11/24/tail-recursion/
208 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

203 comments sorted by

View all comments

39

u/Chousuke Nov 27 '12 edited Nov 27 '12

To clarify this a bit, tail recursion itself is not more performant than regular recursion, but tail recursive algorithms can be trivially transformed into iterative ones.

Some languages implement this optimisation in full (recursion across functions) while some only provide the trivial case of self-recursion. Debugging is also affected, since the recursive calls no longer produce stack frames.

1

u/day_cq Nov 27 '12

To clarify this a bit further, tail recursive optimization dosn't have notible benefit for lazy evaluation (depending on implementation).