Clojure has a loop/recur construct which makes the tail recursion explicit so doesn't need to be done by the JVM. In other words regular recursive calls should not be used for loops if you want performance.
Scala has a similar explicit @Tailrec annotation for its compiler, too:
"A method annotation which verifies that the method will be compiled with tail call optimization. If it is present, the compiler will issue an error if the method cannot be optimized into a loop."
