Your Recursion Is Lying to You

Short summary

Recursion with correct logic still crashes from physical stack limits. Tail-call optimization (TCO) support is inconsistent across JavaScript engines—even properly-structured tail-recursive code may overflow. For production code with unbounded input depths, iteration or explicit stack management is safer than relying on TCO.

• •Stack depth is a physical limit independent of algorithmic correctness
• •No JavaScript engine reliably implements proper tail calls across versions
• •Iteration is the safest choice for production code with unbounded recursion depth

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.