Comment by ceronman
5 years ago
I'm not a C programmer at all, so please forgive me if this question doesn't make sense. If I remember correctly, there is a `register` keyword in C that you can use to hint the compiler that a given variable should be stored in a register. I think I've never seen this keyword in use, and I'm wondering why. But I think it would be useful for this same use case, without requiring tail calls and with the advantage of being fully portable.
`register` was used as a hint, and things like LLVM have Mem2Reg optimization passes that do a much better job at this sort of promotion.
IIRC register was mainly used in cases where hardware were involved, much like the volatile keyword. However unlike volatile, I don't believe register is even considered by compilers these days.