Can every recursion be converted into iteration?

Question

A reddit thread brought up an apparently interesting question:

Tail recursive functions can trivially be converted into iterative functions. Other one

Answer 1

Recursion is implemented as stacks or similar constructs in the actual interpreters or compilers. So you certainly can convert a recursive function to an iterative counterpart because that's how it's always done (if automatically). You'll just be duplicating the compiler's work in an ad-hoc and probably in a very ugly and inefficient manner.