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> it doesn’t offer tail-call elimination

Why not? I’ve heard people say this about C too and I never understood it: LLVM and GCC both have optimization passes that perform tail-call elimination.

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Typically when people say that they mean that the language doesn't have guaranteed tail-call optimization. You can certainly write Rust that has the TCO pass applied, but it can be brittle because it's just an optimisation pass that might not happen.

I don’t know the actual reason. It may have been a desire to keep flexibility in the language design by not imposing TCE rules. I think one reason is that you can’t have a tail call if you need to free things afterwards, so changing the signature from taking an object to borrowing it could make calls to the function no-longer eliminatable. Rules for which calls are tail-calls can already be confusing to people in simpler languages.

I think they also make debugging harder, aren’t used much in higher-level code, and aren’t necessary if you have good looping constructs.

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