[mmalone]

Interesting. Thanks for the details.

In theory a compiler can do this optimization for you and can use simple syntactic checks to determine whether recursion terminates and whether the optimization applies (at least given a language designed with these things in mind, I'm sure this is much harder or maybe impossible in C++). With something more modern than C++ I'd imagine you could adopt a rule that says "you can use recursion but we compile with --dont-allow-nonterminating-or-unoptimizable-recursion".