Comment by rayiner

The best way to deal with tail call "optimization" is to not treat it as an optimization at all. Tail calls are a syntactic property of source code. You can easily determine whether a given call is in a tail position by recursively traversing the AST. Then you just have to generate tail calls in a way that uses constant stack space. This is mostly a matter of properly designing the calling convention. See: www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/schani/diplarb.ps‎.