Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming

Recursion elimination

There's yet one other possibility you might want to explore, but that falls beyond the realm of FP, and rather into algorithm design. It's a computer science fact that any algorithm that is implemented using recursion has an equivalent version that doesn't use recursion at all and rather depends on a stack. There are ways to systematically transform recursive algorithms into iterative ones, so if you run out of all options (meaning: not even continuations or thunks help you) then you'd have a final opportunity, by replacing all recursion with iteration. We won't be getting into it --as I said, this elimination has little to do with FP-- but it's important to know that the tool exists and you might be able to use it. ...