Question

I am trying to solve the project euler 2nd question. Why is the below code resulting into stack overflow ? I am using recur so it should not be storing all the recursive calls on the stack.

(defn sum
  [[a b]]
  [b (+ a b)])

(defn fib-r
  ([n] (fib-r n 0 [0 1]))
  ([n s [a b]]
     (if (= n 0)
       s
       (let [[c d] (sum [a b])
             e (if (even? c) c 0)
             f (+ s e)]
         (recur (dec n) f [c d])))))

(fib-r 4000000)

Answer 1

your getting an integer overflow (rather than a stack overflow)
If you use BigInts (BigInt literals end with N) then Clojure will
happily compute the correct result:

(defn fib-r                                                                                          
  ([n] (fib-r n 0N [0N 1N]))                                                                     
  ([n s [a b]]                                                                                     
     (if (= n 0N)                                                                            
       s                                                                            
       (let [[c d] (sum [a b])                                               
             e (if (even? c) c 0N)                               
             f (+ s e)]                             
         (recur (dec n) f [c d])))))
#'autotestbed.core/fib-r                                                                                               
autotestbed.core> (fib-r 40000)
1158997879999727672946417013062336891791160667328280503727448.... big number