Comment by soegaard

C is often used as target language for compiler from higher level languages. The Scheme programming language requires all tail calls not to grow the stack. Therefore implementors have explored various techniques including trampolines. I don't have a citation, but you can find the answer in the papers on compiling Scheme to C. If there is no guarantee of TCO in the target language, then the generated programs will be slower.

Incidentally, this is why implementors of (especially) high level languages are annoyed that TCO was removed from the JavaScript specification. There are even solution for having TCO and still have stack inspection.

https://github.com/schemedoc/bibliography/blob/master/page8....