rrecursive

rrecursive is a programming concept and accompanying library design aimed at expressing recursive computations in a stack-safe and analyzable form. The term describes a model in which recursive calls are represented as data that a managed execution engine steps, rather than as direct function calls on the call stack. This separation allows deeper or more dynamic recursion without the risk of stack overflow and enables formal reasoning about termination and resource usage.

The core idea of rrecursive is to encode recursion using abstractions such as base cases, step expressions, and continuation points. An execution engine, often implemented as a trampoline or in continuation-passing style, iteratively advances these expressions. By moving control flow out of the native call stack, rrecursive supports very deep traversals, expandable dynamic programs, and sophisticated optimizations such as memoization within a controlled, configurable framework.

Key features commonly associated with rrecursive implementations include trampolining to convert recursive processes into iterative loops, support for tail-like recursive patterns, and the option to fuse multiple recursive steps into a single optimized pass. Some designs also incorporate memoization or caching to avoid recomputing identical subproblems and to improve performance on dynamic programming tasks.

Usage scenarios for rrecursive include tree and graph traversals, parsing, and other algorithms that naturally model problems recursively but are limited by stack depth in conventional implementations. While not yet standardized across languages, rrecursive concepts influence how developers think about recursion, control flow, and resource bounds. See also recursion, tail calls, continuation-passing style, and trampolines.