Does functional programming take up more memory?

Question

Warning! possibly a very dumb question

Does functional programming eat up more memory than procedural programming? I mean ... if your objects(data structures whatever) are all imutable. Don't you end up having more object in the memory at a given time.

Doesn't this eat up more memory?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4522304/does-functional-programming-take-up-more-memory

Answer 1

It depends on what you're doing. With functional programming you don't have to create defensive copies, so for certain problems it can end up using less memory.

Many functional programming languages also have good support for laziness, which can further reduce memory usage as you don't create objects until you actually use them. This is arguably something that's only correlated with functional programming rather than a direct cause, however.