Recursion techniques

While recursion is a very good technique, you may face some problems because of the way it is internally implemented. Each function call, recursive or not, requires an entry in the internal JavaScript stack. When you are working with recursion, each recursive call itself counts as another call, and you might find that there are some situations in which your code will crash and throw an error because it ran out of memory, just because of multiple calls. On the other hand, with most current JavaScript engines, you can probably have several thousand pending recursive calls without a problem – but with earlier browsers and smaller machines, the number could drop into the hundreds and feasibly go even lower. Thus, it could be argued that, at present, you are not likely to suffer from any particular memory problems.

In any case, let’s review the problem and go over some possible solutions in the following sections. Even if you don’t get to actually...