[Pitarou]

How do you apply deforestation ... in the general case?

How do you cut an iron bar in half with a pair of scissors?

Deforestation is a tool; not a universal truth.

You're also pulling a false comparison ... The corecursive function could only be directly equivalent to the linear time, constant memory TCO function in a lazily-evaluated runtime

But I'm using a lazily evaluated runtime. My code is Haskell. And in any case, I used deforestation in the last step to remove the lazily evaluated data structure.

If I understand you correctly, you're telling me that high-level mathematical formalisms work better in Haskell. Yes, they do.