I'd like to see the .tail IL instruction, but the simple recursive functions using tail calls that I've been writing are apparently optimized into loops. I'm actually guessing on this, as I'm not entirely sure what a loop looks like in Reflector. I definitely don't see any .tail opcodes though. I have "Generate tail calls" checked in my project's properties. I've also tried both Debug and Release builds in Reflector. The code I used is from Programming F# by Chris Smith, page 190: let factorial x = // Keep track of both x and an accumulator value (acc) let rec tailRecursiveFactorial x acc = if x <= 1 then acc else tailRecursiveFactorial (x - 1) (acc * x) tailRecursiveFactorial x 1 Can anyone suggest some simple F# code which will indeed generate .tail?