Tail-Call optimization

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#7,647 1 comment 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
wasm
Domain
compilers

Research direction

No file, test, or entry point is named in the issue. Start by locating Binaryen's existing tail-call support and optimization-pass tests, then verify whether the three shown transformations are valid in all relevant cases. Done means an implemented pass, if feasible, with coverage for the illustrated call, return-call, and conditional-call forms.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I'm curious as to why binaryen doesn't implement an optimization pass for tailcall feature. Is the optimization itself not feasible?

If it is feasible, I would like to implement it.

The basic idea is we can convert

(func ...
   (call $f)
)

to

(func ...
   (return_call $f)
)
(func ...
   (return (call $f))
)

to

(func ...
   (return_call $f)
)
(func ...
   (if
      (condition)
      (call $f)
   )
)

to

(func ...
   (if
      (condition)
      (return_call $f)
   )
)
Dominant language
WebAssembly
Stars
8.6k
Forks
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Avg merge
2d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
70

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