'OCaml loops: imperative vs recursion [closed]

I just stumbled upon some OCaml code that writes a loop like this:

    let r = ref (f 0) in
    for i = 1 to k - 1 do
      r := f i * !r
    done ;
    !r
  in

Which is interesting as I normally see this done using recursive functions in OCaml usually. Is there an advantage to one versus the other?

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