All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript

Yes I know asking for an explanation causes a lot more nasty voting. This is ridiculous, the site is getting more and more like reddit, and I blame the site's maintainers: There are soooo many things that could be done for a more civilized discussion culture. Like making votes public, meta-voting, requiring explanations for downvotes, a very small downvote pool (e.g. no more than three downvotes per day), etc.

How about somebody would tell me what exactly is missing from those tools I linked to, or what is supposed to be wrong that I wrote? It's not like I insulted anyone. The guy I responded to had a lot less substance in his (short) comments. "It's very superficial" - what is superficial? What is missing? Also, "all I want are two numbers at the end of the process. How long did this take and how much memory did this take." -- well, he gets those number with the DevTools! So what exactly is the complaint? For someone with a question he doesn't seem to try very hard to get an answer. Then someone downvotes posts that try to get more out of him.

As program correctness is concerned, tail calls and recursive calls should behave exactly the same (except stack use), so going by correctness alone, either the choice doesn't matter at all or tail calls are preferable. So the logical thing to do would be to always use tail calls.

The post goes on to list a number of disadvantages, but those seem to be either debugging concerns or platform-specific implementation concerns.

The former doesn't seem to be something that should be solved in the code - the document itself lists a number of solutions. The latter is not something that I as developer could judge as I likely don't have knowledge about the specific implementation of the platform the code is running on (if I know the platform in advance at all)

So it seems to me, STC shifts the problem of deciding to the developer even though the developer has no good tools to actually solve it.

Otherwise, you may decide to just use recursion everywhere and then your stack overflows when your N is bigger than expected.

When in doubt, don't use recursion and don't expect that you get TCO.

If you look at the documentation of what I am actually interested it is time-timeEnd or profile-profileEnd. With profile end I just don't get output on console and have to jump back and forth between these views looking at a ton of crap I am not interested in. With timeEnd I get the number I want but would like to see a "safe" approved way of where to place the timeend while dealing with async/promises/recursion separately and together.

I am used to testing different approaches within a function. Running the approaches overnight and just getting the 2 numbers printed out for each. Only if these deviate from expectations does the timeline and flamechart etc become useful. But Google debugging implementation seems to assume perf optimization is done in the opposite direction.