[soegaard]

It's great to have support for tail recursion when implementing recursive solutions, but it is a tall order to add to more traditional languages. However tail recursion is not the only trick Racket has up its sleeve.

In Racket you can't get a stack overflow.

At the time a potential stack overflow is detected, the oldest parts of the current stack is copied to the heap and a fresh stack is introduced. When the stack underflows the saved stack is reinstated. [At least this is a rough idea of how it works - implementation details differ to make it process efficient.]

This means that you can rely on recursive solutions even when the recursive call occurs in a non-tail context.

This idea (no stack overflows) could be used in more traditional languages too. As you write in traditional languages there is a real risk to bump into the stack limit.

[throwamon]

Sounds very good, but you make it sound like there are no considerable downsides. Why aren't more languages doing it?

[soegaard]

Beats me.