Are any JavaScript engines tail call (TCO) optimized?

Question

I have a tail recursive pathfinding algorithm that I\'ve implemented in JavaScript and would like to know if any (all?) browsers would possibly get stack overflow exceptions

Answer 1

Currently no JavaScript implementations recognise tail recursion. Changes are being made in ECMAScript 6, and as others have said, there is an open ticket on V8.

Here you can see V8's generated assembler for a tail recursion function:

Example of how V8 compiles recursion

Compare that to how Clang has compiled the same function in C

Example of C compiler tail recursion

V8 retains the recursive call, whereas the C compiler has recognised the tail recursion and changed it into a loop.