From: david.brown@hesbynett.no

On 30/09/2025 17:54, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> In another newsgroup the question came up to what degree the
> GNU "C" compilers can handle optimization of recursions like
> fib() or ack(), i.e. cascading ones. Somebody here may know?
>
> Can we expect that (with the higher optimization levels) the
> exponential complexity from cascaded recursion gets linearized?
>
> Janis

Optimising compilers can generally handle straight tail recursion well
enough.  So if you write a simple "fib" function with two recursions,
you'll get one turned into a loop and the other kept as recursion.  I
don't think there is a general way to turn multiple recursions into
loops - you have to make a stack-like data structure somewhere along the
line, and no C compiler is going to do that automatically.

You might find that compilers like the GHC for Haskell can do better,
since recursion is the bread and butter of functional programming languages.

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