Clue 0.3 did precisely that. Unfortunately it required a patched Lua to produce the special bytecode. I decided that that was cheating --- plus it meant the Lua

Clue 0.3 did precisely that. Unfortunately it required a patched Lua to produce the special bytecode. I decided that that was cheating --- plus it meant the Lua backend wouldn't generate code for LuaJIT. Changing it to generate tail calls would be an excellent idea, but to do it right would require a major rewrite of the backend (most of the code generator is common code).