Should I avoid recursion with code that runs on the iPhone?
Or put another way, does anyone know the max stack size on the iphone?
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Should I avoid recursion with code that runs on the iPhone?
Or put another way, does anyone know the max stack size on the iphone?
Yes, avoiding recursion is a good thing on all embedded platforms.
Not only does it lowers or even removes the chance of a stack-overflow, it often gives you faster code as well.
You can always rewrite a recursive algorithm to be iterative. That’s not always practical though (think quicksort). A way to get around this is to rewrite the algorithms in a way that the recursion depth is limited.
The introsort is a perfect example how it’s done in practice. It limits the recursion depth of a quicksort to log2 (number-of-elements). So on a 32 bit machine you will never recurse deeper than 32.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introsort
I’ve written quite a bit of software for embedded platforms in the past (car entertainment systems, phones, game-consoles and the like) and I always made sure that I put a upper limit on the recursion depth or avoided recursion at the first place.
As a result none of my programs ever died with a stack-overflow and most programs are happy with 32kb of stack. This pays off big time once you need multiple threads as each thread gets it’s own stack.. You can save megabytes of memory that way.