Recursion is an excellent tool in a developer’s toolbox, yet it is frequently misunderstood. Used correctly, it can give programs that are fast, readable and succinct. Used incorrectly, it can produce some tricky bugs.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose we write a function that calculates x to the power of y for integers. In early programming languages, recursion was a rather controversial feature, so you’d just use a loop:

By the mid-60s, we had languages that supported recursion. You could write this power function recursively:

However, this innocent looking code can fail us if exponent is greater than the maximum depth of the stack. In Python, this is the stack depth is 1,000, so our function doesn’t support values of exponent greater than 1,000.

This risk of stack overflow makes recursion much less useful. Even though recursion is ideally suited for some class of programs (e.g. depth-first search is much more hassle when written iteratively), we cannot use it for arbitrary data with a fixed size stack.

In the 70s, Scheme popularised tail-call optimisation. The Scheme standard requires implementations to optimise function calls (if they are ‘in the tail position’, i.e. the caller has nothing left to do) such that they use constant stack space. With care, we can now write a recursive power function that works for arbitrary values.

This is a big improvement, and enables us to write many more functions recursively. However, the programmer must know exactly what forms of recursion will be optimised. It’s easy to carelessly refactor a function such that it is no longer tail-recursive. This is especially risky when running unit tests, as tests often use small datasets, hiding the stack overflow you’ve accidentally introduced.

However, what if we want to write recursive functions that aren’t strictly tail-recursive? For example, we might want to save the value of our recursive call before returning it.

The scheme standard defines tail-calls, but also allows implementations to recognise other equivalent recursive forms (see the note at the end of the section). However, we’re now in an awkward situation where changing Scheme interpreter could break our program if we depend on that behaviour.

In an ideal world, we’d be able to write this function without an accumulator, as in our original recursive version.

We’re in luck – some languages do provide this! For example, Haskell, Oz, and even some C compilers, are smart enough to optimise this without us providing an accumulator.

This is called ‘tail recursion modulo cons’, which is a tail-recursive function that also applies a ‘constructor’ function to the result. A constructor function is a function that is both commutative and associative. Many useful functions, such as * and cons (a lisp function for building a list), meet these criteria.

Where does this leave us? We’ve seen that different programming languages support writing robust recursive functions in various forms, but you need to be aware of which functions will be optimised. To make matters worse, it’s not possible to provide a full stack trace for functions that have been optimised this way. Guido cites this as a reason for not providing TCO in Python.

Can we do better?

In Trifle lisp, we plan to take an explicit approach. We plan to make TCO opt-in, so our power function is labelled as requiring TCO.

Using set-tco! documents that the programmer expects tail-call optimisation, and acts as an assertion. If the function is refactored to a form that cannot be optimised, set-tco! will throw an error. This allows programmers to depend on this behaviour.

Opting-in also has the nice property that programmers don’t have to use tail-call optimisation. If they’re developing or debugging and want full stack traces, we can provide them. If we add optimisation for tail-call modulo cons, programmers can depend on that optimisation too.

The obvious disadvantage of opting-in is the loss in performance for functions that we could optimise but don’t. gcc compromises by providing tail-call optimisation at its higher optimisation levels. We could do exactly the same – the only loss is the completeness of stack traces.

In conclusion: Recursion is a great tool in your toolbox. If it makes your code clearer, absolutely consider using it. Make sure you are aware of what guarantees your language provides, how big your stack is, and how big your input data will be.