alt Hacker NewsFor people that like functional style and using recursion for everything, TCO is a must. Otherwise there’s no way around imperative loops if you want decent performance and not having to worry about the stack limit.
Perhaps calling it an “optimization” is misleading. Certainly it makes code faster, but more importantly it’s syntax sugar to translate recursion into loops.
You don't need full fledged TCO for that; see Clojure's recur for an example. Zig recently added something similar but strongly typed with match/continue. These all map exactly to a closed set of mutually recursive functions with a single entry point, which is quite sufficient (and then some) to fully replace iterative loops while still desugaring to the same exact code.