Lambda the Ultimate

When writing a runtime system or an interpreter in C (though TBH it’s true about all programming languages that I know of) with e. g. moving garbage collection or support for continuations, you find that, surprisingly, the call stack is too abstracted away by the semantics, and basically have to roll a separate one yourself (without the benefits of hardware support) or resort to things like getcontext(3) or GCC’s split stacks that technically are an extension of the semantics that need their own definition. LLVM tries to support precise GC, but falls short of real-world uses. Another facet of this problem is the unpredictability of stack overflows with alloca(3), C99 variable-length arrays or just plain old recursion. (I have to count my recursive calls so that my recursive-descent parser doesn’t crash on malicious input? Really?)

This motivates the question: was there a language that officially permitted or even required managing one’s own call stack, inspecting stack frames and the like? Note that this doesn’t mean not having some sort of subroutine linkage, but could mean banning recursion unless the user explicitly allocates space for it, so that the implicit stack is statically guaranteed to be bounded. (FORTRAN didn’t have recursion, of course, but I doubt it was for this reason.) Things I’d want to (be able to) implement in such a language are, again, a moving GC, closures, coroutines, and continuations. I’d expect the language to be reasonably ALGOL- or ML-like so that FORTH and its kin are excluded.

On a second thought it looks like the requirements of moving GC are orthogonal to those of continuations and well-defined stack overflow behaviour, but closures seem to be somewhere in between, so I’m leaving it as one question with possibly multiple valid answers.