In addition to what others have said here; often recursive calls can also trivially be optimized into loops by the compiler. This is very convenient in most ca

In addition to what others have said here; often recursive calls can also trivially be optimized into loops by the compiler. This is very convenient in most cases, but could hide the fact that a direct recursive call will overflow your stack. This isn't apparent and would test out ok until someone makes a small; seemingly insignificant change which the compiler can't do tail call optimization on, and all of a sudden things fail.