Tail Call Recursion

Tail Call Recursion is a special form of recursion where the function recurring is the last action taken in the function.

static void myFunction(int x) {
	if (x < 500)
		x -= 10;
 
	myFunction(x);
}

Because we know for a fact the current variables in the stack frame will not be read or written to again, we can reuse the same storage space for the next call of the function, without allocating a new stack frame.

This is a common optimization in functional programming languages like elixir where recursion is the primary method of iterating through a data structure:

def has_x?(x, []), do: false
def has_x?(x, [head | list]) do
	if x == head do
	  true
	else
	  has_x?(x, list)
	end
end