I’m trying to learn Julia on examples. For now I’m trying to solve some problem with DFS as a core algorithm in my solution. This recursive DFS is running on a max 1000×1000 grid and I’ve got StackOverFlow (I’m pretty sure it is not the case of a bug in DFS itself). I found some articles, where ex…

It’s not so much that Julia is the wrong tool, but that recursion in Julia is the wrong tool. You can always rewrite your recursion by pushing and popping from a stack, and you know better than the compiler what data you care about. With the recursive solution, the compiler needs to keep around a bu…

Hi @rgu , welcome aboard! Julia can do recursion without major issue, the trouble (as you noted) is the stack depth. A DFS on a 1000x1000 grid means you might have as many as 1 000 000 stacked recursive calls, which is a lot. I would definitely recommend you switch to a loop-based implementation (or…

To be honest, I think that blog post makes a terrible job of explaining why Julia would struggle with recursion, and to compare its limitations to other languages (what is Slowsort? where is its code in both languages? why define a depth of recursion before failure metric and just use it for Julia?)…

On the contrary, I think recursion is a great tool and use it often in Julia; of course, it has its limits, but no more so than in most other performance-oriented imperative languages (e.g. C). For example, it is a great way to exploit memory locality in data structures, as I demo’ed for matrix mul…

[image] Henrique_Becker: This is a valid comment for all languages, I do not understand why to single out Julia here. Yes, I routinely interact with people who’ve hit recursion depth limits in Python. This is just something people eventually need to learn to handle in whatever language they u…

Well, I try to expand. I am a teacher in high school, quite clever kids of age about 13-17. We use Python and C++. Python — as a wide-range tool (to be able to write standard algorithms like sorting or Eratosphenes sieve as well as some image processing, ML, etc) Kids who want to write more effec…

Exactly the same — it is standard error I see in students code when they got Run-Time with clear DFS and I know that setrecursionlimit is a common practice here. I just realized that in Julia workaround is to use stack instead. That is much harder task (for students) but it is honest at least, I ag…

I think at the high school level, whatever you want to do in Python you can do in Julia, and vice versa. Their syntax is very similar, and all the bases are covered on either side. In my opinion, Julia might actually be a nice language for learning programming, since you can poke around as deep as y…

I think Juila is a very interesting language for teaching programming. Python of course gives you, with the libraries, the easiest path for students to code anything and produce something pretty. But if your students have already the prospect of using low level languages for anything, they are inter…

To add on this: Learning recursion without hitting the stack limit is NOT learning recursion. Learning about algorithms and programming techniques should include the underlying principles of how processors and memory management work. Recursion and the stack is an example on why this is important. …

Recursion in Julia — bad idea?

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Recursion in Julia — bad idea?

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