Recursive functions

Algorithms with a functional flavor tend to favor recursion over looping. This is often hidden in higher-level functions like map and filter, so you don't often see it on your code. However, when the time comes, some platforms (including the JVM) can make your life quite difficult: deep recursion means a deep stack, so you can easily get a StackOverflowError, even for not-so-big values.

Stack-safe deep recursive functions

Kotlin comes with a built-in DeepRecursiveFunction which solves this problem by keeping the call stack in the heap, which usually has a much bigger memory space allocated to it.

The Fibonacci sequence is an all-time favorite example of a recursive operation which requires a deep stack even for small values. The function is only defined for non-negative n, so we split the actual worker function from the top-level one, which checks the constraint over the argument.

fun fibonacciWorker(n: Int): Int = when (n) {
  0 -> 0
  1 -> 1
  else -> fibonacciWorker(n - 1) + fibonacciWorker(n - 2)
}

fun fibonacci(n: Int): Int {
  require(n >= 0)
  return fibonacciWorker(n)
}

fun example() {
  fibonacci(6) shouldBe 8
}

To make this function stack-safe we move the worker from being a regular function into being a DeepRecursiveFunction. The latter takes a block which defines the function, very similar to a regular one. The key change is that instead of calling fibonacciWorker, we use callRecursive every time we need recursion.

val fibonacciWorker = DeepRecursiveFunction<Int, Int> { n ->
  when (n) {
    0 -> 0
    1 -> 1
    else -> callRecursive(n - 1) + callRecursive(n - 2)
  }
}

Function in a val

Note that we've used val to save the DeepRecursiveFunction, instead of fun. However, since that type overloads the invoke operator, we still can call it as if it was a function, so no changes are required for fibonacci.

Memoization

There's an enormous amount of duplicate work being done in a call to fibonacci. Here is the call tree of fibonacciWorker(4), you can see that we end up in fibonacci(2) a couple of times. Not only that: we can see that in the recursive call for n - 1 we eventually require the value for n - 2 too. Could we make this function a bit less wasteful?

Fibonacci 🤯

The number of calls required to compute Fibonacci is also given by the Fibonacci sequence!

Fibonacci is a pure function, in other words, given the same argument we always obtain the same result. This means that once we've computed a value, we can just record in some cache, so later invocations only have to look there. This technique is known as memoization, and Arrow provides an implementation in the form of memoize.

import arrow.core.memoize

val fibonacciMemoized = ::fibonacciWorker.memoize()

fun fibonacci(n: Int): Int {
  require(n >= 0)
  return fibonacciMemoized(n)
}

fun example() {
  fibonacci(6) shouldBe 8
}

Memoization takes memory

If you define the memoized version of your function as a val, as we've done above, the cache is shared among all calls to your function. In the worst case, this may result in memory which cannot be reclaimed throughout the whole execution, so you should apply this technique carefully.

There's some literature about eviction policies for memoization, but at the moment of writing memoize doesn't offer any type of control over the cached values. Aedile is a Kotlin-first caching library which you can use to manually tweak your memoization.

Recursive functions

Stack-safe deep recursive functions​

Memoization​

Stack-safe deep recursive functions

Memoization