Скачать или смотреть scala.bythebay.io: Owein Reese, Don’t Blow Your Stack: Recursive Functions for Beginners in Scala

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Scale By the Bay 2019 is held on November 13-15 in sunny Oakland, California, on the shores of Lake Merritt: https://scale.bythebay.io. Join us!
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Recursion is a fundamental building block of algorithmic design and a corner stone of many functional data structures. The Scala compiler has direct support for tail recursion and indirect support for mutually recursive function calls with a compiler plugin. So what makes a function recursive and what shape must it have to allow for tail call elimination? For that matter, what is tail call elimination? What does it mean to be mutually recursive? How does all this get translated into working, non-stack blowing code at compilation time? In this beginner-friendly look at all things recursion we’ll show how to take an imperative function and transform it into a recursive function. Through live code examples, attendees will see how to keep code referentially transparent without the need for external mutable variables while correctly handling state between “loops." Finally, we’ll introduce a new compiler plugin that adds mutual tail recursion and demonstrate how it can simplify complex, twisted logic.

Owein Reese
MediaMath
New York, NY
Websitetwitter.com/OweinReese
A hands on manager who continues to write code at work and in his spare time. His group is distributed across the country and he loves being able to work and hire anyone from anywhere. At MediaMath, they are responsible for globally deployed systems capable of handling peak traffic of 1.7M req/s in aggregate, with a mix of both I/O and CPU bound services.

Besides writing code, he enjoys wind surfing and flying airplanes. Ask him about his new wave board, his favorite airport to visit or what new code he is writing (hint: a compiler plugin!)