# Tacopy

8 Hacker News commenters recommended Tacopy and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Short Python library adding tail call optimization to recursive functions, praised for its simple approach. Critics note it only handles tail recursion and adds overhead.

## Why people recommend it

- Short, simple, straightforward implementation (2 comments): "OP's approach is surprisingly straight forward, only a few hundred lines." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46159345)) "fairly succinct and to the point" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158563))
- Elegant way to keep recursion (2 comments): "this was a net good since one can preserve the "clean syntax" from recursion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46186506)) "seeing an elegant solution to this is really cool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46160172))

## What people warn about

- Only optimizes tail recursion, breaks some cases (2 comments): "The current implementation breaks semantics of functions with tail recursion from within loops" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46255299)) "it doesn't really seem to be full Tail Call Optimization, but only optimizes tail recursion" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165351))
- Runtime rewriting adds overhead (2 comments): "I'm also not convinced that this actually is worth the effort, considering it’s doing runtime rewriting of Python using Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162212)) "There's quite a bit of overhead." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158462))
- Overkill for a few lines (2 comments): "Why do i need a fully fledged library for something that is basically a few lines of code?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46158136)) "I'm also not convinced that this actually is worth the effort, considering it’s doing runtime rewriting of Python using Python." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162212))
- Looks LLM-generated, obfuscated code (2 comments): "It's very llm-y. But, kudos to them for preserving the commit history / being honest about it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162460)) "you're calling a built in function, why make obfuscate this in an "llm way"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161303))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Polars](https://hackerapproved.com/p/polars.md): 152 recommend
- [pandas](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pandas.md): 93 recommend
- [NumPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/numpy.md): 86 recommend
- [SciPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scipy.md): 12 recommend
- [sh Python library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sh.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Tacopy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tacopy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).