Programming Kotlin

Chapter 14Programming Recursion and Memoization

Hands down, recursion is one of the coolest programming techniques. Once we’re able to formulate a solution to a problem using solutions of subproblems, we can implement that using recursion. Recursion is intriguing, a bit enigmatic, but also highly expressive.

While recursion is very powerful, it unfortunately runs into runtime stack overflow for large-size problems, making it ineffective when it’s much needed. A technique called tail call optimization can solve this problem, and Kotlin provides support for that.

Recursion plays a significant role in programming, but algorithms often memoize data to achieve significant performance improvements. Kotlin doesn’t provide built-in support for memoization, ...