Haskell has a traditional C-style stack, but it's usually very small (a few KiB). The evaluation model is very different from most other languages; recursive de

Haskell has a traditional C-style stack, but it's usually very small (a few KiB). The evaluation model is very different from most other languages; recursive definitions do not necessarily result in recursive machine code, and almost all allocation is done on the heap. Certain rare forms of pathological code (not recursive definitions in general) can result in stack overflows. The cause is usually something like extensive recursion (which here includes iteration) without any other memory allocation or thunk evaluation. In any case, the point was not that we should all use recursion on Church-encoded Peano numbers for computation, since that is obviously very inefficient, but rather that tail recursion in particular—which does not result in excessive stack use, when implemented sanely—is a more general construct than iteration. It can be used to implement iteration, of course, but also other control flow patterns like state machines and coroutines which would otherwise require additional language support. The only major obstacle is poor language implementations, mostly for imperative languages (including Java), which insist on storing contextual data on the stack which is provably no longer needed by the program. Kotlin is a bit better but still hampered by the limitations of the JVM, so some kinds of tail calls (not direct recursion) still use stack space. EMCAScript 6 specifies guaranteed tail-call elimination, which should benefit Typescript, but Safari appears to be the only major environment which gets it right so far[0]. [0] https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/#test-proper_tail_calls_(tail_call_optimisation) https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/#test-proper_tail_...