Instantiation of recursive generic types slows down exponentially the deeper they are nested. Why?

Question

Note: I may have chosen the wrong word in the title; perhaps I\'m really talking about polynomial growth here. See the benchmark

Answer 1

In Java, computation time appears to be a little more than linear and far more efficient than you're reporting in .net. Using the testRandomPopper method from my answer, it takes ~4 seconds to run with N=10,000,000 and ~10 seconds to run with N=20,000,000