Stack Overflow scenarios in Recursive Function for Factorial Calculation in Ruby with Large Inputs
I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help. This might be a silly question, but I'm working with a stack overflow behavior when trying to calculate the factorial of large numbers using recursion in Ruby... The code I wrote looks like this: ```ruby def factorial(n) return 1 if n <= 1 n * factorial(n - 1) end puts factorial(10000) ``` When I run this code for large values like 10000 or even 5000, I get the following behavior: ``` SystemStackError: stack level too deep ``` I know recursion can lead to deep stack calls, and I'm aware that Ruby has a limit on the stack depth, but I thought the recursion depth for calculating factorial could handle reasonably large numbers. I've already tried rewriting the function to use iteration instead, but I'm curious about how I can optimize or refactor my recursive approach to handle larger inputs more gracefully. I also considered using memoization but wasn’t sure how to implement that effectively in this context. Any guidance on best practices for this kind of recursion in Ruby, or if I should consider a different approach entirely, would be greatly appreciated. I'm currently using Ruby 3.0.2. For context: I'm using Ruby on Windows. Any help would be greatly appreciated!