Tail-call optimization in Elm

What is TCO?

Tail-call optimization (TCO) is a very neat trick that the Elm compiler does to make recursive functions a lot more performant and stackoverflow-proof.

Evan Czaplicki describes it very well in this article and I recommend you go read it. He calls it tail-call elimination but it’s a different name for the same thing.

To summarize Evan’s article, a “tail-call optimized” function is a recursive function that gets compiled to using a loop instead of function calls to itself. Let’s take the following code as an example…

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

2 Likes