Why should recursion be preferred over iteration?

Question

Iteration is more performant than recursion, right? Then why do some people opine that recursion is better (more elegant, in their words) than iteration? I really don\'t see

Answer 1

Recursion is one of those things that seem elegant or efficient in theory but in practice is generally less efficient (unless the compiler or dynamic recompiler) is changing what the code does. In general anything that causes unnecessary subroutine calls is going to be slower, especially when more than 1 argument is being pushed/popped. Anything you can do to remove processor cycles i.e. instructions the processor has to chew on is fair game. Compilers can do a pretty good job of this these days in general but it's always good to know how to write efficient code by hand.