i only meant that "optimized/eliminated tail call" is more useful terminology than an uneliminated tail call not counting as "a tail call". i find this distinction useful when discussing clojure, for instance, where you have to explicitly trampoline recursive tail calls and there is a difference between an eliminated tail call and a call in tail position which is eligible for TCO

i'm not sure how commonly tail calls are eliminated in other forthlikes at the ~runtime level since you can just do it at call time when you really need it by dropping from the return stack, but i find it nice to be able to not just pop the stack doing things naively. basically since exit is itself a threaded word you can simply¹ check if the current instruction precedes a call to exit and drop a return address

in case it's helpful this is the relevant bit from mine (which started off as a toy 64-bit port of jonesforth):

  .macro STEP                                                                             
    lodsq                                                                               
    jmp *(%rax)                                                                         
  .endm  

  INTERPRET:                                                                              
    mov (%rsi), %rcx                                                                    
    mov $EXIT, %rdx                                                                     
    lea 8(%rbp), %rbx                                                                   
    cmp %rcx, %rdx     # tail call?                                                     
    cmovz (%rbp), %rsi # if so, we                                                      
    cmovz %rbx, %rbp   # can reuse                                                      
    RPUSH %rsi         # ret stack                                                      
    add   $8, %rax                                                                      
    mov %rax, %rsi                                                                      
    STEP

¹ provided you're willing to point the footguns over at the return stack manipulation side of things instead

You don’t need recursion to make use of tail call elimination. In Scheme and SML all tail calls are eliminated. GCC also does it, but less often. Still, it’s not recursion that triggers it.