Recursion Limits and Tail Recursion

Multiple function calls

Recursion is relatively inefficient compared to looping. This is because each step in a recursion results in a function call, whereas each step in a loop merely requires a “jump” to a different place in the code.

Calling a function involves considerably more work than a simple jump, and, in any system, it is going to take more time and use extra memory (memory is required to store the current state of the function – the values of its local variables – each time the function calls itself recursively).

Limit on recursive calls

However, Python has a rather more immediate problem. Recursive calls are ...