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Drawing the line on inline

Posted Jan 16, 2006 21:34 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627)
Parent article: Drawing the line on inline

One thing that's missing from this discussion is that in many cases you want some invocations of function F to be inlined and other invocations of the same function to NOT be inlined. In particular invocations of F in hot paths should be inlined and invocations in cold, infrequently executed code should not (unless inlining F is actually smaller than a regular function call to F). You can't get this effect just by twiddling 'inline' declarations in the source, so the compiler (perhaps assisted with profile information) can actually do a better job then you can at the source level (unless you go around inline the code by hand in the source code, which is madness).

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moving inline keyword from callee to caller

Posted Feb 23, 2007 14:03 UTC (Fri) by samtherecordman (guest, #43207) [Link]

In the case where you want to a function to be inline in some cases and not others what about:

int small_function(int val)
{
return val+1;
}

void main()
{
int i = 0;

for(i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
{
small_function() __inline__
}
}

This would support selective inlining, and also helps the programmer who is new to the code visualize what is going on - you don't need to see the definiton of small_function() to see that the function will be inlined.