I've written some nice, very clear C code using recursion; a nice example was a simple copying garbage collector which has something like 2-3 words of overhead

I've written some nice, very clear C code using recursion; a nice example was a simple copying garbage collector which has something like 2-3 words of overhead on the stack per recursive call (made use of some global variables to reduce the number of arguments passed between functions though). The actual moving code was only maybe 10 lines.