[JonChesterfield]

It's moderately annoying to implement because it messes with the calling convention in architecture dependent ways. So it isn't an IR transform, it's N lowerings for N architectures.

Clang and llvm understand them, and you can require them from the front end, but the cost is some backends will hard error on them as unimplemented.

[throwaway17_17]

Just to clarify, are you saying that a language’s calling convention is implemented differently per architecture? Or is it that the tail call implementation needs to be implemented in different ways per architecture and that would mess with the required calling convention?

[JonChesterfield]

Calling convention covers where values are placed in memory (or stack or registers) by the caller so that the callee can find them. There can be N of these as long as caller/callee pairs agree sufficiently. The instruction set you're compiling to influences the cost of different choices, e.g. how many and which registers to use.

Tail calls mean reusing memory (notably the stack) and arranging for there to be no work to do between the call and the return. E.g. if arguments are passed by allocating on the stack, you can't deallocate after the call, so you have to make the stack look just right before jumping.

If you've got multiple calling conventions on your architecture, they each need their own magic to make tail calls work, so you might have 'fastcall' work and 'stdcall' error. Iirc I implemented it for a normal calling convention on one arch and didn't bother for variadic calls.

I suppose one could have a dedicated convention for tail calls as well, I just haven't seen it done that way. Usually the callee doesn't know and can't tell whether it was called or tail-called.