3 ms·

Messes with calling conventions. Citing Rust: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-April/003557.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/201

• pizlonator 10y ago
  I agree that it messes with calling conventions. This is a problem for AOT languages, where binary compatibility is paramount and so you cannot change the calling convention. Since tail calls don't play well with existing native conventions, they end up being hard (or sometimes even impossible) to implement. That's not really an issue in JS or other VM-based languages. JS VMs don't make their internal calling conventions public. In JSC, our old calling convention was incompatible with PTC, so we changed our calling convention to make PTCs work.
• astrange 10y ago
  GCC/Clang can generate code with tail calls, if you don't mind losing the stack frame. And I don't think they have any issue tail-calling external libraries on the ABIs I know. How are these different?
• steveklabnik 10y ago
  It's worth noting that's from 2013; in my understanding, things have changed in LLVM since then, which was another big blocker.