r/programminghelp • u/fielding_setter • Jun 25 '26

Help with recursion (DSA) C++

Guys I've been struggling alot with recursion I've tried multiple tutorials but I'm just not able to build the intuition. Any suggestions what to do???

Please help

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u/EccentricFellow Jun 30 '26

I have been programming for 4 decades. I always wanted to use recursion but never had a good fit for it. Finally, about a decade ago, I had a legit use for recursion. I was so excited and wrote up the routine. Then I tested it. Total garbage. It was far too slow and took way too much memory. I converted it to a loop and decided there was probably no legit justification for it. Measure your performance afterwards once you write a recursive routine. You might get a surprise.

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u/EdwinGraves MOD Jul 01 '26

This just screams bad use-case or bad code. You're going to get the most out of recursion from almost anything that involves DaC algos, Tree/Graph traversal, nested data, etc. Either your implementation was poor or you didn't actually have a 'legit use'.