Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

Recursion elimination

There's yet one other possibility that you might want to explore, but that falls beyond the realm of FP and 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 instead depends on a stack. There are ways to systematically transform recursive algorithms into iterative ones, so, if you run out of all options (that is, if not even continuations or thunks can help you), then you'd have a final opportunity to achieve your goals by replacing all recursion with iteration. We won't be getting into this—as I said, this elimination has little to do with FP—but it's important to know that the tool exists and that you ...