Recursive function calling in JavaScript

Question

I know you should tread lightly when making recursive calls to functions in JavaScript because your second call could be up to 10 times slower.

Eloquent JavaScript state

Answer 1

This is just a way the particular JS engines the browsers use are built, yes. Without tail call elimination, you have to create a new stack frame every time you recurse, whereas with a loop it's just setting the program counter back to the start of it. Scheme, for example, has this as part of the language specification, so you can use recursion in this manner without worrying about performance.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445363 indicates progress being made in Firefox (and Brendan Eich speaks in here about it possibly being made a part of the ECMAScript spec), but I don't think any of the current browsers have this implemented quite yet.