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

In Java, recursive solutions generally outperform non-recursive ones. In C it tends to be the other way around. I think this holds in general for adaptively compiled languages vs. ahead-of-time compiled languages.

Edit: By "generally" I mean something like a 60/40 split. It is very dependent on how efficiently the language handles method calls. I think JIT compilation favors recursion because it can choose how to handle inlining and use runtime data in optimization. It's very dependent on the algorithm and compiler in question though. Java in particular continues to get smarter about handling recursion.

Quantitative study results with Java (PDF link). Note that these are mostly sorting algorithms, and are using an older Java Virtual Machine (1.5.x if I read right). They sometimes get a 2:1 or 4:1 performance improvement by using the recursive implementation, and rarely is recursion significantly slower. In my personal experience, the difference isn't often that pronounced, but a 50% improvement is common when I use recursion sensibly.