Why is recursion so slow?

[Dan Upton]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
>
> slix wrote:
>>
>> Recursion is awesome for writing some functions, like searching trees
>> etc but wow how can it be THAT much slower for computing fibonacci-
>> numbers?
>
> The comparison below has nothing to do with recursion versus iteration.  (It
> is a common myth.) You (as have others) are comparing an exponential,
> O(1.6**n), algorithm with a linear, O(n), algorithm.
>

FWIW, though, it's entirely possible for a recursive algorithm with
the same asymptotic runtime to be wall-clock slower, just because of
all the extra work involved in setting up and tearing down stack
frames and executing call/return instructions.  (If the function is
tail-recursive you can get around this, though I don't know exactly
how CPython is implemented and whether it optimizes that case.)