You are not going to blow your stack without recursion, even with a fairly small stack size. Iirc swift has huge stacks for objective-c interop by default so ev

You are not going to blow your stack without recursion, even with a fairly small stack size. Iirc swift has huge stacks for objective-c interop by default so even that shouldn't be a problem. Overhead is a fair point for jit/interpreted languages if you want to write performance critical code in a jit/interpreted language for some reason. Tiny functions are almost certainly going to be inlined if the compiler does its job, though, so it isn't a huge deal for compiled languages. And the point is that the function can be so tiny that you would just replace it with a new function. Then you can reason locally about behavior. This is a very functional approach, though, and can break horribly in imperative languages so there definitely is a balance.