What is the correct way to use async/await in a recursive method?

Question

What is the correct way to use async/await in a recursive method? Here is my method:

public string ProcessStream(string streamPosition)
{
    var stream = Ge         


        

Answer 1

While I have to say upfront that the intention of the method is not entirely clear to me, reimplementing it with a simple loop is quite trivial:

public async Task ProcessStream(string streamPosition)
{
    while (true)
    {
        var stream = GetStream(streamPosition);

        if (stream.Items.Count == 0)
            return stream.NextPosition;

        foreach (var item in stream.Items)
        {
            await ProcessItem(item); //ProcessItem() is now an async method
        }

        streamPosition = stream.NextPosition;
    }
}

Recursion is not stack-friendly and if you have the option of using a loop, it's something definitely worth looking into in simple synchronous scenarios (where poorly controlled recursion eventually leads to StackOverflowExceptions), as well as asynchronous scenarios, where, I'll be honest, I don't even know what would happen if you push things too far (my VS Test Explorer crashes whenever I try to reproduce known stack overflow scenarios with async methods).

Answers such as Recursion and the await / async Keywords suggest that StackOverflowException is less of a problem with async due to the way the async/await state machine works, but this is not something I have explored much as I tend to avoid recursion whenever possible.