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Zig appears to have a proposed solution to this similar to your option 1, move recursion to the heap.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1639

They're also looking at static analysis of the maximum stack depth which might help in some cases.

Being able to make recursive functions use the heap would be great. I assume it would need to be opt-in since you'll change performance characteristics, but I almost always rearrange recursive algorithms to use a loop and a heap allocated stack structure instead. There's no reason the compiler couldn't help do that for me.

I'm highly skeptical that static analysis of maximum stack depth will work, because of higher-order functions.

In rust, unsafe operations can be marked such to silence the compiler when you know better; one could imagine something similar for a stack depth analyzer in zig. Or, for example, zig could use a finite stack depth when it can prove that's feasible, and emit code that will spill to the heap for cases it can't.

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