Don’t we have debug symbols or something like it to be able to translate the optimised version into the thing you saw in code? If you need to dive into the assembly you are in for a hell of a ride anyway due to all kinds of optimisations happening.
And tail recursive functions encode their state in the args and the body. There isn't any information in the stack anyway, by definition.
If one does need to debug mutually tail recursive functions, step through them, this isn't a problem. The point is that they don't consume stack space. If you do want a stack of invocations, then don't write tail recursive code?
This style of argumentation that the GP showed should have a name.
BTW my original comment is at -1, hate but only in the tail position.
> There isn't any information in the stack anyway, by definition.
This is untrue. There are 3 possibilities:
1. Constant stack space (perhaps zero) across calls with caller-cleanup
2. Callee-cleanup
3. Caller-cleanup where an argument indicates how much stack space to clean/where to set the stack pointer
