Sometimes I find myself writing tail recursive functions. I have been searching high and low, and I have found there is tail recursion in the .NET framework, but I'm not sure in what cases I can, and in what cases I can't use tail recursion efficiently. For example, I have a simple tree, lets call it

public class Tree
{
  public Tree parent = null;

  public Tree(Tree parent)
  {
    this.parent = parent;
    this.children = new List<Tree>();
  }

  public List<Tree> children {get; private set;}

  public Tree root
  {
    get
    {
      return this.parent == null ? this : parent.root;
    }
  }
}

for the root property, will the compiler emit a loop? will it emit .tail? Will the jitter respect the .tail? will nothing fancy happen, and will the algorithm just run recursively? Most importantly, should I rewrite this to be iterative?

c# clr
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