Tail-Call Elimination Use-Cases

I'm currently putting some work into trying to eliminate tail-calls in
gcc. My main focus is to enhance the compilation of GHC's intermediate
C-code in order to improve the usability and performance of Haskell
programs in general.


I know there are a lot of people out there who have worked on related
issues before, not always for the same reasons as I do. So, what I'm
trying to do is collect a few use-cases for such an optimisation and
to find out how you or your project would benefit from proper tail-calls.
That is, tail-calls that do not open new stack-frames when jumping to a
function, but re-use the old one (briefly spoken).


I think, such an optimisation in gcc would open a new customer-base to
the compiler (and I'm not only referring to the Haskell community here).
A few use-cases and examples would help me to convince maintainers and
programmers of gcc alike, just how important it is to solve the
"tail-call problem".


I know for a fact that RMS would be very interested to have a fully
general tail-call optimisation in gcc, but I'd like to hear more
opinions and ideas on the subject.


Thanks in advance. I'm looking forward to a fruitful discussion.
Andreas Bauer.


--
(o_ Andreas Bauer, baueran at in.tum.de, http://home.in.tum.de/baueran/
//\ "An algorithm must be seen to be believed." -- Donald Knuth
V_/_

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