My statement was within the context of there somehow being 10GB of node metadata (which could mean different things, but I'm assuming it means 10GB of stack usage to recursively visit each node.)
If you're up to 10GB worth of nodes in a syntax tree, you're probably doing something elaborate enough that you'd want to squeeze out every ounce of performance, and you're possibly a domain expert. Maybe you're making a static analysis tool? On the other hand, a lot of static analysis tools are painfully slow, so maybe there's a lot of recursive searching on deep data structures going on!
Likewise, if you're trying to solve an NP-hard problem and you're recursing through 10GB of anything, you're probably already asking the computer to do something unreasonable by many orders of magnitude, and all a larger stack would do is delay an eventual out of memory error. Or, you're doing something clever and knowingly pushing the computer to its limits, and so you once again would want to squeeze out every ounce of performance and go with an iterative solution.
If you're up to 10GB worth of nodes in a syntax tree, you're probably doing something elaborate enough that you'd want to squeeze out every ounce of performance, and you're possibly a domain expert. Maybe you're making a static analysis tool? On the other hand, a lot of static analysis tools are painfully slow, so maybe there's a lot of recursive searching on deep data structures going on!
Likewise, if you're trying to solve an NP-hard problem and you're recursing through 10GB of anything, you're probably already asking the computer to do something unreasonable by many orders of magnitude, and all a larger stack would do is delay an eventual out of memory error. Or, you're doing something clever and knowingly pushing the computer to its limits, and so you once again would want to squeeze out every ounce of performance and go with an iterative solution.