On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 14:48 -0700, Jared Updike wrote:
Thanks, Minh. So are things like recursion and memory sharing typically out the window?
Recursion works in C, but every function call pushes stack, so recursive depth is limited by RAM (compare to tail call optimization in many functional programming languages where the stack frame is reused if code is written iteratively with an accumulator). Most of the time for performance (and to be idiomatic) in C you will just write for and while loops and modify state in place. Welcom to C.
GCC can do a limited tail-call optimisation these days. It covers the obvious self tail call case and I believe some less trivial cases but it's not as comprehensive as in a typical functional language compiler. Duncan