No they can't, at least not without compromising on several points laid out in TFA. Mainly these two: - Tail calls also "play badly" with assumptions in C

No they can't, at least not without compromising on several points laid out in TFA. Mainly these two: - Tail calls also "play badly" with assumptions in C tools, including platform ABIs and dynamic linking. - Tail calls require a calling convention that is a performance hit relative to the C convention. See other posts in this discussion for examples of the impacts of some alternate calling convention choices.