posted 8 years ago
Hi Jean-François,
Yes, the book includes a chapter about how to use stack safe recursion in Java. This is of course not done through TCE (Tail Call Elimination) but through trampolining. It is then a bit slower, but generally fast enough. Note that we still have to make functions tail recursive in order to use trampolining. Changing a non tail recursive function into a tail recursive one might be challenging the first time, but it soon becomes a second nature, excepted of course when it is not possible. The foldRight function on List is such an example. This function may only be implemented in a stack safe manner by first reversing the list (or through reversed iteration when possible). This makes it unusable on infinite lists. Fortunately, infinite lists are lazy (meaning we only implement them as lazy structures). And implementing a lazy foldRight on a lazy list is easy. This is something missing in many languages that have lazy lists (such as Stream in Java 8).
