How does your favorite language handle deep recursion? [closed]

Answer 1

In some non pathological cases (like your), (latest) Lua will use tail call recursion, ie. it will just jump without pushing data in stack. So the number of recursion loops can be almost unlimited.

Tested with:

function f(i, l)
    if i < l then
        return f(i+1, l)
    end
    return i
end

local val1  = arg[1] or 1
local val2  = arg[2] or 100000000
print(f(val1 + 0, val2 + 0))

Also with:

function g(i, l)
    if i >= l then
        return i
    end
    return g(i+1, l)
end

and even tried cross-recursion (f calling g and g calling f...).

On Windows, Lua 5.1 uses around 1.1MB (constant) to run this, finishes in a few seconds.