Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

Recursion techniques

While recursion is a very good technique, it may face some problems because of the details the way it is actually implemented. Each function call, recursive or not, requires an entry in the internal JavaScript stack. When you are working with recursion, each recursive call itself counts as another call, and you might find that there are some situations in which your code will crash and throw an error because it ran out of memory, just because of multiple calls. On the other hand, with most current JavaScript engines, you can probably have several thousand pending recursive calls without a problem (but with earlier browsers and smaller machines, the number could drop into the hundreds and could feasibly go even lower), ...