Many developers when solving specific problems prefer to stick with a recursive approach, and the reason might be because in some cases it helps get a better time complexity(Big O) thus improving the service performance. It also may involves personal preferences, i.e some might think it’s a cleaner aproach, more readable, more elegant and so on.
For most languages, this approach can demand a lot of memory to be executed as everytime you call a function in a recursive manner, this call goes to the memory stack to be executed later. Thus, depending on the amount of pushes to the stack, it may be heavier than choosing a non-recursive approach to execute it, even though its time complexity can be superior.
Erlang and Elixir Approach
In Elixir and Erlang, we have what’s called tail-call optimization. A tail call function is a function which call another functions(including itself) as its last thing. And this optimization works in a way that’s similar to a goto or a jump and you don’t need to allocate extra memory when pushing more functions to the stack.
The following snippet gives an example of what is a tail call function:
def first_func(...) do
...
another_func(...)
end
But how does it actually works ?!?!
In the snippet above, the final result of the first_func is the result of another_func. This is why the compiler can safely perform the operation by jumping to the beginning of another_fun without doing additional memory allocation. When another_func finishes, you return to whatever place original_func was called from.
Endless loops won’t cause Stack Overflow
Take the following function :
def endless_loop(...) do
...
endless_loop(...)
end
This endless loop takes advantage of the tail-optimization as it can run without consume any additional memory .
This solution fits well for arbitrarily large iterations. There is a downside, though. Whereas classical (non-tail) recursion has a more declarative feel to it, tail recursion usually looks more procedural.