Does Erlang support tail recursion?

2019-12-22

Does Erlang support tail recursion?

When that happens, as with TCO, the Erlang VM avoids storing the stack frame. As such tail recursion is also possible between multiple functions. As an example, the chain of functions a() -> b().

What is tail recursion Erlang?

A tail-recursive function that does not need to reverse the list at the end is faster than a body-recursive function, as are tail-recursive functions that do not construct any terms at all (for example, a function that sums all integers in a list).

Is tail recursion recursion?

A tail recursion is also a kind of recursion but it will make the return value of the recursion call as the last statement of the method. In traditional recursion, calculation will happen after the recursion call while the calculation will occur before the recursion call in tail recursion.

Is tail recursion faster than recursion?

While tail-recursive calls are usually faster for list reductions—like the example we’ve seen before—body-recursive functions can be faster in some situations. That’s often true when mapping over a list, where the function takes a list and returns a list without reducing it to a single value.

Why Erlang is so fast?

In the usual case, Erlang does not use a contiguous chunk of memory to represent a sequence of bytes. The result is that concatenating two strings (I/O lists) takes O(1) time in Erlang, compared O(N) time in other languages. This is why template rendering in Ruby, Python, etc. is slow, but very fast in Erlang.

What is a tail recursion function?

A function is tail-recursive if it ends by returning the value of the recursive call. Keeping the caller’s frame on stack is a waste of memory because there’s nothing left to do once the recursive call returns its value. So, instead of allocating a new frame for the call, we can reuse the existing one.

How do you identify tail recursion?

An easy way to tell if a recursive function is a tail recursive is if it returns a concrete value in the base case. Meaning that it doesn’t return 1 or true or anything like that. It will more than likely return some variant of one of the method parameters.

What’s are the benefits of tail recursion?

Advantage of using tail-recursion := so that the compiler optimize the code and convert it to a non-recursive code. Advantage of non-recursive code over recursive one := the non-recursive code requires less memory to execute than a recursive one. This is because of idle stack frames that the recursion consumes.