Golang - Recursion

Recursion

The programming language Golang is known for its simplicity, efficiency and for work really well with concurrency. The use of recursion isn't very common in Go, but in some situations is the best solution to be applied. Recursion is when a function calls itself to achieve the expected goal.

Efficiency

Always verify if the recursion solution will be efficient due to several executed calls.

Alternatives

Always verify the possibility of apply other solutions with iterations encouraging code clarity.

Code

An example of countdown in Go is below.

package main

import "fmt"

func countdown(number int) {
    if number >= 0 {
        fmt.Printf("Current value: %d\n", number)
        countdown(number - 1)
    } else {
        fmt.Println("Finished")
    }
}

func main() {
    countdown(10)
}        

>>> Current value: 10
>>> Current value: 9
>>> Current value: 8
>>> Current value: 7
>>> Current value: 6
>>> Current value: 5
>>> Current value: 4
>>> Current value: 3
>>> Current value: 2
>>> Current value: 1
>>> Current value: 0
>>> Finished