C tail call optimization

Question

I often hear people say that C doesn\'t perform tail call elimination. Even though it\'s not guaranteed by the standard, isn\'t it performed in practice by any decent implement

Answer 1

Although modern compilers MAY do tail-call optimization if you turn on optimizations, your debug builds will probably run without it so that you can get stack traces and step in/out of code and wonderful things like that. In this situation, tail call optimization is not desired.

Since tail call optimization is not always desirable, it doesn't make sense to mandate it to compiler writers.