rust-lang/rust-clippy

New Lint: No recursion without tail calls

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#1,678 opened on Apr 15, 2017

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A-lintL-perfT-middlegood first issue

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Description

Based on this HIC++ guideline.

The stack explodes much faster using recursion than a huge BFS work queue would explode the heap. Therefore, if clippy detects some direct or indirect recursion that does not benefit from tail call optimisation, clippy should issue a warning along with a short description about why this is potentially bad and a short hint on how to transform recursive algorithms to iterative ones (e.g. using a work queue and BFS). And maybe a tl;dr about what tail calls are and how to make the algorithm tail recursive.

Contributor guide

Research direction
Study how Clippy detects recursion in existing lints, and understand tail call optimization conditions in Rust.
Tech stack
rust
Domain
developer experiencetooling
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-2 days
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Active
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Clear
Prerequisites
RustGit
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60