Comment by UncleEntity

From my research into the subject the easiest way to implement it would be a 'musttail' macro which falls back to a trampoline for compilers which don't support it. The problem then becomes having the function call overhead (assuming the compiler can't figure out what's going on and do tail-call optimizations anyway) on the unsupported systems with each and every opcode which is probably slower than just a Big Old Switch -- which, apparently, modern compilers are pretty good at optimizing.

The VM I've been poking at is I/O bound so the difference (probably) isn't even measurable over the overhead of reading a file. I went with a pure 'musttail' implementation but didn't do any sort of performance measurements so who knows if it's better or not.