Run results for: Recursion vs Iteration

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0 Safari/605.1.15

Browser: Safari 17

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.15.7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

while loop

10.8M/s

for loop

10.7M/s

recursion

1.7M/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ while loop	10,835,086 Ops/sec
for loop	10,746,182 Ops/sec
recursion	1,747,934 Ops/sec

Script Preparation code:

  var nums = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
  
  function sum_recurse(arr, i) {
   i = i || 0;
   if (i > arr.length)
     return 0;
   else
     return arr[i] + sum_recurse(arr, i + 1);
  }
  
  function sum_while(arr) {
   var total = 0,
       i = 0,
       len = arr.length;
  
   while (i < len) {
    total += arr[i++];
   }
  
   return total;
  }
  
  function sum_for(arr) {
   var total = 0,
       len = arr.length;
  
   for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    total += arr[i];
   }
  
   return total;
  }

Tests:

recursion
sum_recurse(nums)
while loop
sum_while(nums)
for loop
sum_for(nums)