A simple tail recursive function:
unsigned int f( unsigned int a ) {
if ( a == 0 ) {
return a;
}
return f( a - 1 ); // tail recursion
}
Tail recursion is basically when:
- there is only a single recursive call
- that call is the last statement in the function
And it’s not “better”, except in the sense that a good compiler can remove the recursion, transforming it into a loop. This may be faster and will certainly save on stack usage. The GCC compiler can do this optimisation.