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;
}
}
}