Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent
Posted Aug 21, 2025 22:11 UTC (Thu) by
anton
(subscriber, #25547)
Parent article:
Python, tail calls, and performance
Actually tail calls in C have not been around forever. The C calling convention has been that the callee does not remove any stuff the caller has put on the stack. The caller could see the declaration
int f();
, the actual call could have n>0 arguments, and the actual function could have m≤n parameters. That would not always work if the callee removed the arguments.
So the caller had to remove the arguments between the call and the following return, turning the call into a non-tail call.
When I looked in 1994 at the C compilers of the day, they did not perform tail-call optimization for the kind of usage shown in the artic (EN)

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**📖 中文解读**
以上内容由AI翻译自英文原文，可能存在不准确之处。建议阅读[原文](https://lwn.net/Articles/1034703/)获取最准确的信息。

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🔗 **原文链接**: [Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent](https://lwn.net/Articles/1034703/)
🏷️ **转载来源**: Hacker News
> 本文由小九AI技术站翻译整理，内容版权归原作者所有。
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> _转载自 Hacker News，内容版权归原作者所有_

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⏱️ 2026-08-10 22:01