The JVM and Tail Recursion

In an attempt to investigate the performance of a trampolined interpreter on the JVM, I discovered something interesting.

First, some background. In essence, trampolining is a strategy used to avoid stack overflow on platforms (like the JVM) that save to the stack even when not necessary , e,g while doing a tail recursive function call. So after doing a CPS transform and then trampolining it by returning a lambda wrapped "thunk", my interpreter *should have* handled an infinite tail recursive call *without* a stack overflow exception. But it failed anyway!

After Dan Friedman pointed out (by email) that "If you use exceptions in Java, you will regain tail recursion. I think that is the only way to get around Java. ", I did some digging and found something even more interesting.

Tail recursive (java) functions are properly handled by some java JVMs (specifically the JITs) and not others! See this article for a good explanation.

Try running Listings 4 and 5 (from the referenced article) on your JVM :-D . I suspect that C# code equivalent to the two listings in the article (numbered 4 and 5) would both run perfectly. Can someone with a Windows machine and dotNet installed let me know if it works? (post a comment here or send me email! Thanks in advance!)

Footnote: the conversion of the tail recursive function (in the article) into the while loop form is one example of how a trampolining interpreter could "break stack build up".