"...very bad style"? That's quite an overstatement. You can enable individual optimizations with gcc. Just add `-foptimize-sibling-calls` to the debug CFLAGS and you're set. Tada! Straightforward code and debug-ability.
But that would be making your code dependent on a particular feature of a particular compiler. If you then want to port your code to Windows (lots of open-source code runs there too), you'll have to deal with the problem again there. If you wrote the code with an explicit loop, it would just work everywhere.
