Tail/Non tail recursion

[Bjorn Gustavsson]

Thomas Lindgren <thomasl_erlang@REDACTED> writes:

[...]
> Between 1 and 2, there may in general be a garbage
> collection. Thus, if a generational collector is used,
> the code needs to check whether A was tenured or not,
> and if tenured, record an old-to-new pointer.
> 
> (As I recall, BEAM:s GC furthermore did not support
> such recording, since there was no need for it
> elsewhere. I'm not sure of how things are now.)

The current GC does not support pointers from the old
generation to the new. There is a newer, experimental,
not stable GC implementation that includes a write barrier
to allow pointers from the old generation to the youngest.


Regarding making the cons operation tail-recursive, I cannot
see that it can be done without entirely re-designing the Beam
instruction set in a non-backward compatible way. Therefore,
it will probably never be done.

/Bjorn
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