recursion and static methods

[Gorgorath]

Hey, fellow developers:)

a short one:)
is it safe to recursively call a static method?

cheers Paul

[Herkules]

its save as long as you can prevent a stack overflow....

[Gorgorath]

:-/ well, i've just managed to get a stack overflow in my recursively calles BSPTree builder, so i should make the methods non static?!

cheers,

Paul

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[cfmdobbie]

No.  You're got a stack overflow because you're not breaking out of your recursive function chain - static has nothing to do with this.

Go back through the code and confirm that your logic is correct.

[King_of_Men]

You might be getting overflows even with correct logic, if your problem is big enough. Recursion is very easy to program, but fantastically inefficient.

[swpalmer]

Actually I vaguely remember Jeff mentioning that Java's recursion isn't all that inefficient.  The implication was that it is more efficient that recursion in a typical C program.

[Jacko]

It might be more efficient, but you have still only got a finite amount of stack space. (Tail recursion would be a good optimisation for the JVM to do here.)

Making it non static is not going to help any. You will want to use iteration instead.