When there's no TCO, when to worry about blowing the stack?
- by Cedric Martin
Every single time there's a discussion about a new programming language targetting the JVM, there are inevitably people saying things like:
"The JVM doesn't support tail-call optimization, so I predict lots of exploding stacks"
There are thousands of variations on that theme.
Now I know that some language, like Clojure for example, have a special recur construct that you can use.
What I don't understand is: how serious is the lack of tail-call optimization? When should I worry about it?
My main source of confusion probably comes from the fact that Java is one of the most succesful languages ever and quite a few of the JVM languages seems to be doing fairly well. How is that possible if the lack of TCO is really of any concern?
