undefined | Better HN

0 pointsDylan168072y ago0 comments

It adds up to me. It only takes being bitten once to learn that tail calls aren't optimized, and then you stop using them for recursion (or almost entirely stop). You write a for loop and things work. The overall level of broken code is very low.

If it's inconsistent, then people write a lot more tail calls and a lot more sites break on a lot more devices.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

odyssey72y ago

This is the description of a workaround for dealing with tail recursion being broken in V8.

It doesn’t add up if V8 is withholding TCO under the guise that it would cause programmers to write stack overflow bugs unless a new proposed keyword for it gets added to the language. The truth currently is that V8 itself has a stack overflow bug in its omission of TCO, it wouldn’t be right to shift the responsibility for that to the JavaScript programmers. But you’re right, unfortunately the JavaScript programmers are the ones who have to deal with the consequences of V8’s spec non-compliance which causes the stack to overflow when it shouldn’t.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse