Functional Programming in Java

Using Tail-Call Optimization

The biggest hurdle to using recursion is the risk of stack overflow for problems with large inputs. The brilliant TCO technique can remove that concern. A tail call is a recursive call in which the last operation performed is a call to itself. This is different from a regular recursion, where the function, in addition to making a call to itself, often performs further computations on the result of the recursive call(s). TCO lets us convert regular recursive calls into tail calls to make recursions practical for large inputs.

Java does not directly support TCO at the compiler level, but we can use lambda expressions to implement it in a few lines of code. With this solution, sometimes called trampoline calls, we ...