Possibly Pythonic Tail Call Optimization (TCO/TRE)

[MRAB]

On 2015-07-15 12:22, Mark Lawrence wrote:
> On 15/07/2015 10:13, Gregory Ewing wrote:
>> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>> I'm still interested in the explicit "replace current stack frame with
>>> this call" operation. Calling it "goto" seems wrong, as most languages
>>> with goto restrict it to _within_ a function,
>>
>> This just suggests to me is that most language designers
>> are not very imaginative. :-)
>>
>> A tail call *is* a goto. That's how you implement one in
>> assembly language -- you write a jump instruction instead
>> of a call instruction. The jump doesn't have to be to
>> the same function.
>>
>
> IIRC the realms of the C setjmp and longjmp.  I'm just wondering out
> aloud if anybody has ever tried playing with cPython using these, or
> whether the code and/or Python itself is just too complex to allow this
> to even be tried, let alone succeed.
>
The problem with longjmp is that it could inadvertently bypass some
clean-up code or deallocation, or, in the case of CPython, a DECREF.