Isn't the overhead of a new function every time going to slow it down? Like I know that LLVM has special instructions for Haskell-functions to reduce overhead, but there is still more overhead than with a branch, right? And if you don't use Haskell, the overhead is pretty extensive, pushing all registers on the stack, calling new function, push buffer-overflow protection and eventual return and pop everything again. Plus all the other stuff (kinda language dependent).

I don't understand what advantage is here, except for stuff where recursive makes sense due to being more dynamic.

[–] noli@programming.dev 22 points 5 months ago

Compiler optimizations like function inlining are your friend.

Especially in functional languages, there are a lot of tricks a compiler can use to output more efficient code due to not needing to worry about possible side effects.

Also, in a lot of cases the performance difference does not matter.

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