Recursive function causing a stack overflow
- by dbyrne
I am trying to write a simple sieve function to calculate prime numbers in clojure. I've seen this question about writing an efficient sieve function, but I am not to that point yet. Right now I am just trying to write a very simple (and slow) sieve. Here is what I have come up with:
(defn sieve [potentials primes]
(if-let [p (first potentials)]
(recur (filter #(not= (mod % p) 0) potentials) (conj primes p))
primes))
For small ranges it works fine, but causes a stack overflow for large ranges:
user=> (sieve (range 2 30) [])
[2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29]
user=> (sieve (range 2 15000) [])
java.lang.StackOverflowError (NO_SOURCE_FILE:0)
I thought that by using recur this would be a non-stack-consuming looping construct? What am I missing?
