Reports tail recursion, that is, when a method calls itself as its last action before returning.

Tail recursion can always be replaced by looping, which will be considerably faster. Some JVMs perform tail-call optimization, while others do not. Thus, tail-recursive solutions may have considerably different performance characteristics on different virtual machines.

Example:

  int factorial(int val, int runningVal) {
    if (val == 1) {
      return runningVal;
    } else {
      return factorial(val - 1, runningVal * val);
    }
  }

After the quick-fix is applied:

  int factorial(int val, int runningVal) {
    while (true) {
      if (val == 1) {
        return runningVal;
      } else {
        runningVal = runningVal * val;
        val = val - 1;
      }
    }
  }