Comment by pjmlp
1 year ago
It will compile, and eventually blow up nicely with a stack overflow OS fault.
Ah, the joys of writing "portable" C code with #ifdef spaghetti, across commercial UNIXes and their own C compilers, 20 years ago.
It only got better because for many people just like they assume Web == Chrome, C gets C == GCC, blessifully ignoring everything else.
Nowadays clang is also considered, mostly because a couple of companies wanted to replace GCC, and naturally clang needs to be able to match whatever GCC offers.
> It will compile, and eventually blow up nicely with a stack overflow OS fault.
Not at all guaranteed. Stack overflow is undefined behaviour, which means compilers can optimise your program on the assumption that it doesn’t happen.
Ah true, yet another case that one tends to forget about.
Well, if you use recursive code, you better know what you're doing. With or without tail call optimization.
Loops are just a special, limited case of recursion.
(And only necessary in languages that have trouble implementing function calls properly.)