Reply To: Grab bag of questions

There is no special architectural support for tail calling at present. The LLVM-based compiler and tool chain can convert recursion to tail calling loops

I think there are some programs / languages which explicitly rely on tail calls, in ways that can’t be easily elided with TCO. Eg mutually-recursive functions and tail calls to dynamic functions, to give the most obvious examples.

I don’t have enough experience in functional languages to know the details; but there’s been some discussion about this subject on the WebAssembly tail-calls proposal page:

Since we don’t use wasm function parameters at all, we can assume
all wasm type signatures of our functions are i32(). The returned i32
indicates the call target (all calls become tail calls). Then we can
use a trampolined mini-interpreter which given the first function to
enter, repeatedly invoke the function, perform some side-effects,
retrieve the next call target, then use the call_indirect instruction
to call into the next target. This is the current approach of
asterius.

Now, asterius is deprecated and GHC now includes wasm targets; I haven’t checked if it used the same tricks, but I assume it does.

tl;dr: For Haskell and other functional languages, you either need hardware support for tail calls or you accept that the language is going to route every call through a trampoline in the worst case (unless the compiler can provably find and remove every tail call instance ahead of time).