One type of refactoring is to replace recursion with iteration. You could replace iterate_big_datastructure with an iteration class. I know, it will require dynamic memory allocation. But do not forget, that you can also run out of stack if you allow unlimited recursion. Usually, the heap is much bigger than the stack, especially if you are working with a lot of threads that all require their own stack. In a sense it would be like allocating one chunk of memory and use this for the 'recursive' invocations inside your iterator. An iterator like implementation would also allow you to 'jump' around and restart at a different location.
I don’t know if you’re trying to solve the problem in the first snippet or the more general problem. The first snippet is just to illustrate what a lexical goto can do rather than the only thing it can do.
A similar transformation would be converting to CPS with a big trampoline. Both of these differ from lexical goto and algebraic effects in a few ways:
- they require annoying manual/automatic code transformations that may make your code slower
- they don’t necessarily provide much safety
- they can be hard to type
- they can be hard to compose
These are issues which algebraic effects aim to solve.
Note that these techniques are strictly more powerful than lexical goto which only lets you unwind the stack to a particular tack frame (and recall unwinding means you forget about everything unwound).
