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== Tail call optimization == There is a caveat with recursive programs: Each function call takes up stack space. The deeper you recurse, the more likely you are to run out of stack space and crash your program. This makes recursion useless in most programming languages. However there is a compromise: If a return in a function is just a call to another function then that return call is a 'tail call'. Languages that implement tail call optimization will re-use the current function call's stack for the function you're calling, solving the issue of stack space. All the examples on this page use tail calls and run in Lua which implements tail call optimization. This means every program on this page is immune to stack overflows. The 1977 [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:AIM-443.djvu AI Lab Memo 443] talks more broadly about how tail calls are like goto statements that you can pass arguments to. Huge shout-out to the folks at Wikisource that transcribed this to an accessible text form. The significant downside of tail call optimization from a user perspective is that it can make debugging more difficult as you lack a proper stack trace. From an implementer perspective the problem is that stack cleanup is tricky: A function that tail calls another cannot clean up any temporary variables it passes along. The solution to this is to make sure function stack use is identical and have the caller clean up, or to implement garbage collection.
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