alt Hacker NewsI sort of see what you are getting at but I am still a bit confused:
If I have a program that based on the input given to it runs some number of recursions of a function and two compilers of the language, can I compile the program using both of them if compiler A has PTC and compiler B does not no matter what the actual program is? As in, is the only difference that you won’t get a runtime error if you exceed the max stack size?
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Zacharias030 • yesterday at 8:21 AM
I think features of the language can make it much easier (read: possible) for the compiler to recognize when a function is tail call optimizable. Not every recursion will be, so it matters greatly what the actual program is.
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That is correct, the difference is only visible at runtime. So is the difference between garbage collection (whether tracing or reference counting) and lack thereof: you can write a long-lived C program that calls malloc() throughout its lifetime but never free(), but you’re not going to have a good time executing it. Unless you compile it with Fil-C, in which case it will work (modulo the usual caveats regarding syntactic vs semantic garbage).