title: Is recursion ever faster than looping?
body: <p>I know that recursion is sometimes a lot cleaner than looping, and I'm not asking anything about when I should use recursion over iteration, I know there are lots of questions about that already.</p>
  
  <p>What I'm asking is, is recursion <strong>ever</strong> faster than a loop? To me it seems like, you would always be able to refine a loop and get it to perform more quickly than a recursive function because the loop is absent constantly setting up new stack frames.</p>
  
  <p>I'm specifically looking for whether recursion is faster in applications where recursion is the right way to handle the data, such as in some sorting functions, in binary trees, etc.</p>