Tail Call Optimisation

Our programming language uses recursion to do its looping. This is conceptually a really clever way to do it, but practically it is quite poor. Recursive functions call themselves to collect all of the partial results of a computation, and only then combine all the results together. This is a wasteful way of doing computation when partial results can be accumulated as some total over a loop. This is particularly problematic for loops that are intended to run for many, or infinite, iterations.

Some recursive functions can be automatically converted to corresponding while loops, which accumulate totals step by step, rather than altogether. This automatic conversion is called tail call optimisation and is an essential optimisation for programs that do a lot of looping using recursion.

People who are interested in compiler optimisations and the correspondences between different forms of computation might find this project interesting.