Are you aware of a programming language/compiler that optimizes on recursively written code? I'm finding it difficult to imagine a PL where stack _isn't_ free except tail-recursive code.
(Ultimately you can do "userspace continuations" in any programming language by explicitly transforming your code into CPS, using an explicit FSM if the language doesn't support tail-calls as such, the only price being developer sanity)
I do think there's a real gap in many languages between the natural way to express graph/tree transformations (recursively) and a cache-friendly/mechanical-sympathy-style runtime - see e.g. https://medium.com/@gkossakowski/kentucky-mule-limits-of-sca... . And really this gap shouldn't be there - the language implementation should be able to transform and fuse this kind of tree-walking operation into an efficient implementation - but at the same time it's hard to see how you'd ever make the language spec permit this without resorting to a full-Haskell "everything is lazy everywhere and the language implementation is allowed to evaluate whatever it likes however many times it likes (including 0) in whatever order".