It's there with e.g. the recur kludge (which some people prefer, instead of the implicit style where if you get the position wrong you blow your stack) and real support is waiting for support in the JVM, which with any luck will happen in the next version of Java.

I find clojure's current approach to tail recursion to work very well. Maybe I'm just not functional enough, but I'm not sure why function calls that don't push a stack frame should be done the same way as a regular function call. Doing a tail call explicitly is fine, and seems to work okay.

Why is the demand for tail calls so great?