This Java recursion tutorial shows you how to create a recursive Java factorial function and compares these methods to iterative ones.

I believe you don't benefit from tail recursion on a Java virtual machine, so anything that has lot of depth recursion in Java is problematic.

Thus, in Java, there is a performance hit (albeit slight) for leveraging recursion as opposed to brute force iteration.

In this article, we study some new characterizations of primitive recursive functions based on restricted forms of primitive recursion, improving the pioneering work of R. M. Robinson and M. D.