Luc Maranget wrote:
> In fact you need 7 arguments or more in the callee to
> trigger the unoptimized behavior on a pentium (just checked this time).

This is a fair amount of arguments, but still...

>>What?! Is this true? This effectively means that I cannot count on 
>>tail-call elimination in general?
> 
> 
> Do not take it that bad. In practice, it does not matter much I guess.
> 
> I guess that any ocamlopt back-end passes at least the first six argument in
> registers (and six is a lot).
> 
> Besides stack grow is a less severe issue in native code than it is in
> byte code.  At least in Unix, the process stack may grow to important sizes.

The trouble is that I have always considered idiomatically correct the 
use of tail-recursion in exchange for loops. Often, the main loop of my 
code is actually a non-terminating recursion.

I really think that the lack of full tail-call optimization in ocamlopt 
is BAD! I feel very strongly about this because it is a completely 
unexpected behavior in a proper functional language like Ocaml.

I'll have to verify that nowhere in my code do I use functions with more 
than seven arguments. If need be, I'll have to compact the arguments 
into tuples or records so as to stay within the tail-call optimization 
limit. Yet, although this is feasible and probably will have a minimal 
impact on my code, I still believe that ocamlopt should do anything it 
can to perform proper tail-call optimization all the time.

Alex

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