Summary
In this chapter, we saw why recursion is a critical part of functional programming languages. We looked into how recursive functions make it easier to enforce function purity and immutability. Next, we saw how functions as first-class citizens can make it easier to manage the state of our recursive function calls. We did this by creating outer non-recursive functions that leverage an inner recursive function to perform the calculations.
After, we looked into the performance concerns of recursive and iterative solutions. Here, we saw that recursive solutions are often slower than their iterative counterparts and that eventually, recursive functions run out of memory to operate with, causing our programs to halt (even though this would take a very long time on a 64-bit machine).
Finally, we looked at Tail-Call optimization and Tail-Call recursive functions. Tail-Call optimization is a practical compiler optimization that many languages, such as Haskell and JavaScript, support...
