Coding Practices which enable the compiler/optimizer to make a faster program

Question

Many years ago, C compilers were not particularly smart. As a workaround K&R invented the register keyword, to hint to the compiler, that maybe it woul

Answer 1

Most modern compilers should do a good job speeding up tail recursion, because the function calls can be optimized out.

Example:

int fac2(int x, int cur) {
  if (x == 1) return cur;
  return fac2(x - 1, cur * x); 
}
int fac(int x) {
  return fac2(x, 1);
}

Of course this example doesn't have any bounds checking.

Late Edit

While I have no direct knowledge of the code; it seems clear that the requirements of using CTEs on SQL Server were specifically designed so that it can optimize via tail-end recursion.