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A comment on My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021). Parent comment

Re:My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021) by shadowofneptune on Saturday March 25, 2023 @08:55PM (#35309388)
The most practical uses of recursive functions are those that cannot be easily eliminated. For an interpreter, it could mean dozens of functions all calling each other in a pattern determined at runtime.

The issue used to be with LLVM, yes, but that appears to be solved (see Clang's 'musttail' attribute). Instead it's more about language design. Constructors, destructors, and all of the fancy language features Rust has must work with this new feature, with no changes being visible elsewhere.

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Re:My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021) by User23 on Saturday March 25, 2023 @11:42PM (#35310621)
Tail call optimization isn’t just for recursive functions. Any tail call can be optimized to little more than a jump, which makes implementing threaded code or similar much nicer. Your compiled code will just push the instruction pointer along an array of opcodes in a tight loop with no function call overhead.
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Re:My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021) by shadowofneptune on Sunday March 26, 2023 @01:21AM (#35311271)
Exactly, though I do not see how it is not an example of recursion.
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