Luau - Proper Tail Calls / Recursion - Not Working

[5uphi]

Based on this information: Programming in Lua : 6.3

Lua supports Proper Tail Calls

but when this function is tested in Roblox studio it unfortunately does not work

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The code

function foo (n)
	if n > 0 then return foo(n - 1) end
end

foo(19998) -- make number higher if it does not error for you

print("End")

or

local function foo (n)
	if n % 1000 == 0 then print(n) task.wait() end
	if n > 0 then return foo(n - 1) end
end

foo(19997) -- make number higher if it does not error for you

---

The error

[sleitnick]

Tail calls were removed from Luau. I asked one of the engineers about this a few years ago and this was the response:

Faster Lua VM Released

We don’t have existing plans to revive tail calls. There are more call kinds in the new VM so guaranteed tail calling is somewhat more involved compared to vanilla VM, and in regular code the performance advantages are not significant. So I would say it’s unlikely that they will come back.

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The solution would be to restructure algorithms to use loops instead of recursion.