Re: Tail call elimination

[Pete Dietl]

> - major added dependency (Make needs to be widely portable, and it is
> often part of a boot-strapping procedure.  The core functionality needs to
> be trim.  Heavy lifting needs to be separable.)

The shared library for libgmp does not have dependencies on anything besides
libc, so libgmp only adds one direct dependency and no indirect dependencies.
If so desired, like with Guile integration, we could relegate $(expr)
as a compile-time
option.
GMP also compiles for windows.

> - slow (native int32 is much faster)

I think the performance concern is misplaced. Compared to the time required
to do all of the interpreting and string parsing that we already have to do,
I doubt that there would be any appreciable performance benefit to
using native types.
Especially given the very likely usage of $(expr), which is some
calculations before
processing the targets, which is what really takes significant time.

> - massive YAGNI (Make is a build system, not a general-purpose computing
> platform)

I argue that it already became very much more general purpose when
$(call) was added. Earlier email threads have suggested uses for this
added function.