The cost of inline functions

The cost of inline functions

Doesn't this also depend a lot on the processor architecture? I used to work with a SPARC and there I found that in the GCC of the time, turning on automatic inlining was usually a pessimization for my applications. I assumed that this is because non-inlined calls to simple functions on the SPARC chips are cheap. Most arguments are passed in registers, and the register window mechanism greatly reduces the instructions needed to save/restore caller's register-allocated variables.

I would argue that "inline" as a language feature is just like the "register" storage class. It should not be used unless inlining really is necessary for low-level reasons, and normally the compiler should be left to make inlining decisions based on its knowledge of the target processor trade-offs.