I was thinking about functional programming techniques, recursions, and constness, and linked lists, so I made two experiments to test my compiler. In theory the compiler should be capable of optimizing away tail recursion(I now realize the functions provided here are NOT tail recursive and I apologize for trying to sneak them by as if they are, the actual tail recursive variants can be found in an answer I posted below) and produce a result at compile time without even building the structures in the first place at runtime.

It works as expected on the array variant below:

/**
 * @file test1.c
 */

static inline int my_array_sum(const int n, const int * const xs) {
    if (n == 0) {
        return n;
    } else {
        return n   my_array_sum(n - 1, xs   1);
    }
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{    
    const int xs[] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8};
    const int n = 8;    
    const int sum = my_array_sum(n, xs); 

    return sum;
}

producing the following object code(gcc test1.c -o test1.obj -c -O3, objdump -D test1.obj):

In MinGW/MSys 64bit:

0000000000000000 <main>:
   0:   48 83 ec 28             sub    $0x28,%rsp
   4:   e8 00 00 00 00          callq  9 <main 0x9>
   9:   b8 24 00 00 00          mov    $0x24,