Description
Search Terms
Functional Programming, ES6, Tail Call Optimization, TCO
Suggestion
Would be pretty nice to add a tail call optimization, once present in V8 for NodeJS 7.x, but later removed for some reasons I don't really understand, but about some other performance issues created in the browser. The idea is to create a transpiler to generate the iterative code for some tail-call optimizations, feature already present in Elm for example.
Use Cases
That would allow typescript people to take advantage of some other resources of pure functions without any real worry with StackOverflow from using the functional programming advantages.
The current approach in Typescript is not to use it, use iterative loops or even model the problem such a way that will never impact the code but is a huge problem for people trying to make the code more functional. There's already some implementation of it in some more functional transpilers for JS like Elm and is pretty useful in order to make functions modeling in an easier way.
Examples
Once a programmer code something like:
function fact (x: number, acc: number): number {
if (x === 0) {
return acc;
}
else {
return fact(x - 1, x*acc);
}
}The code generated for javascript would be something like:
function (x, acc) {
while(true) {
if(!x) {
return acc;
}
else {
let t1 = x - 1;
let t2 = acc * x;
x = t1;
acc = t2;
}
}
}