From the "Tail calls, @tailrec and trampolines" blog post: In Scala 2.8, you will also be able to use the new @tailrec annotation to get information about which methods are optimised. This annotation lets you mark specific methods that you hope the compiler will optimise. You will then get a warning if they are not optimised by the compiler. In Scala 2.7 or earlier, you will need to rely on manual
