"Defunctionalising" makes sense for performance. Ability to debug is a pro. I wanted to point out the similarity between these separate methods. In any case tho

"Defunctionalising" makes sense for performance. Ability to debug is a pro. I wanted to point out the similarity between these separate methods. In any case though, I would hope that an optimising compiler would not push onto the stack variables which are not used later in the function. Repeatedly pushing a pointer to the structure you're working on is indeed an overhead of recursive calls.