Recursion Is Lying to You

# Summary Recursive functions that appear logically correct can crash with stack overflow errors when given large inputs, even if they follow proper tail-recursive patterns, because most JavaScript runtimes don't implement tail call optimization and continue allocating new stack frames for each call regardless of depth. While recursion is elegant for solving naturally recursive problems like tree traversals, developers often overlook its hidden operational limitation: the physical stack space available in their runtime environment.