Ask EJS: Is it a good idea to use setTimeout() to implement recursion?

that's not really helpful - you are dodging the "problem at hand". i am asking whether or not to use setTimeout to perform recursion. i know that deep recursions freeze the browser, so setTimeout is a POSSIBLE solution. another thing that can be done is to break the operation in batches of a few and use setTimeout to perform them in async. some points for or against the approach, or perhaps some tips on how to deal with heavy recursions

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MaxArt 2848 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

I'm dodging the problem because that's what you probably should do. Deep recursion brings a lot of problems in JavaScript - first of all, the stack's depth.

But you don't seem to even need that stack, since you're ready to use setTimeout, discarding the closure's scope: that's actually a clear sign that you should use another approach, probably iterative. That would give you a good performance boost too.

That's why using setTimeout is generally frowned upon: it's a hack to get over a language limitation that could be solved with other, more efficient techniques.

So I don't recommend using setTimeout, because I don't recommend using recursion in the first place. Tail call optimization, where available, could solve the depth problem but it won't yield a performance as good as an iterative approach.