FWIW if you're doing explicit recursion for something then it's usually either: a) Going to be bounded by a small number or user controlled b) Something you w

FWIW if you're doing explicit recursion for something then it's usually either: a) Going to be bounded by a small number or user controlled b) Something you would have to use recursion for in any language, like a recursive descent parser. So like you said call stacks growing is usually not a big issue if you know what you're doing.