JavaScript Tail Call Optimization: Specified in ES2015, Still Unimplemented by Most Engines a Decade Later

r/programming·low signal

A blog post (101 upvotes, 33 comments) examines why proper tail calls specified in ES2015 remain unimplemented by V8 and SpiderMonkey, meaning recursive code can still blow the stack despite the spec guaranteeing optimization. Only Safari's JavaScriptCore implements it. The post warns developers that tail-recursive patterns in JavaScript are silently unsafe across most runtimes.