When code is suspiciously fast: adventures in dead code elimination

Part of a recent assignment for one of my classes involved calculating the Fibonacci sequence both recursively and iteratively and measuring the speed of each method. (BONUS: For a fun diversion, here is a paper I wrote about using the Golden Ratio, which is closely related to the Fibonacci sequence, as a base for a number system). In addition, we were supposed to pass the actual calculation as a function pointer argument to a method that measured the execution time.

The task was fairly straight forward, so I fired up Visual Studio 2015 and got to work. I usually target x64 during development (due to some misguided belief that the code will be faster), and when I ran the code in release mode I received the following output as the time needed to calculate the 42nd Fibonacci number:

Recursive: 0.977294758 seconds
Iterative: 0.000000310 seconds

Since calculating $F_{42}$ through naive recursion requires ~866 million function calls, this pretty much jived with my expectations. I was ready to submit the assignment and close up shop, but I decided it’d be safer to submit the executable as as 32-bit application. I switched over to x86 in Visual Studio, and for good measure ran the program again.

Recursive: 0.000000000 seconds
Iterative: 0.000000311 seconds