Recursion or Iteration?

Question

Loops may achieve a performance gain for your program. Recursion may achieve a performance gain for your programmer. Choose which is more important in your situation!

It is possible that recursion will be more expensive, depending on if the recursive function is tail recursive (the last line is recursive call). Tail recursion should be recognized by the compiler and optimized to its iterative counterpart (while maintaining the concise, clear implementation you have in your code).

I would write the algorithm in the way that makes the most sense and is the clearest for the poor sucker (be it yourself or someone else) that has to maintain the code in a few months or years. If you run into performance issues, then profile your code, and then and only then look into optimizing by moving over to an iterative implementation. You may want to look into memoization and dynamic programming.

Comparing recursion to iteration is like comparing a phillips head screwdriver to a flat head screwdriver. For the most part you could remove any phillips head screw with a flat head, but it would just be easier if you used the screwdriver designed for that screw right?

Some algorithms just lend themselves to recursion because of the way they are designed (Fibonacci sequences, traversing a tree like structure, etc.). Recursion makes the algorithm more succinct and easier to understand (therefore shareable and reusable).

Also, some recursive algorithms use "Lazy Evaluation" which makes them more efficient than their iterative brothers. This means that they only do the expensive calculations at the time they are needed rather than each time the loop runs.

That should be enough to get you started. I'll dig up some articles and examples for you too.

Link 1: Haskel vs PHP (Recursion vs Iteration)

Here is an example where the programmer had to process a large data set using PHP. He shows how easy it would have been to deal with in Haskel using recursion, but since PHP had no easy way to accomplish the same method, he was forced to use iteration to get the result.

http://blog.webspecies.co.uk/2011-05-31/lazy-evaluation-with-php.html

Link 2: Mastering Recursion

Most of recursion's bad reputation comes from the high costs and inefficiency in imperative languages. The author of this article talks about how to optimize recursive algorithms to make them faster and more efficient. He also goes over how to convert a traditional loop into a recursive function and the benefits of using tail-end recursion. His closing words really summed up some of my key points I think:

"recursive programming gives the programmer a better way of organizing code in a way that is both maintainable and logically consistent."

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/l-recurs/

Link 3: Is recursion ever faster than looping? (Answer)

Here is a link to an answer for a stackoverflow question that is similar to yours. The author points out that a lot of the benchmarks associated with either recursing or looping are very language specific. Imperative languages are typically faster using a loop and slower with recursion and vice-versa for functional languages. I guess the main point to take from this link is that it is very difficult to answer the question in a language agnostic / situation blind sense.

Is recursion ever faster than looping?

Recursion is more costly in memory, as each recursive call generally requires a memory address to be pushed to the stack - so that later the program could return to that point.

Still, there are many cases in which recursion is a lot more natural and readable than loops - like when working with trees. In these cases I would recommend sticking to recursion.