Re: Excessive Inlining
On Mar 31, 10:52 pm, Ian Collins <ian-n...@hotmail.com> wrote:
James Kanze wrote:
On Mar 30, 7:36 pm, "LuB" <lutherba...@yahoo.com> wrote:
How judicious ought one be when inlining small methods.
That's simple: you never inline anything until the profiler says
you must.
Considering 'inline' is a hint and modern compilers will inline where
they see fit, that's kind of a meaningless statement. Or are you
referring to changing the code, bringing functions into the current
compilation unit for example?
I'm refering to the use of the "inline" keyword, of course.
You're right that some modern compilers will inline without it,
across compilation units, and according to the profiler data.
Most coding guidelines I've seen ban inline functions
completely, for this reason.
Odd, I've never seen that. As Alf said, it would make using templates
kind of hard!
It does.
As with any rule, it can be violated when there are overriding
reasons to do so. But these are rare in application code, and I
can't remember every having seen a template definition in
application code in production software.
In practice, this isn't that restricting. "Application"
generally means dealing with known types anyway, unless you need
dynamic dispatch. Templates tend to be restricted to lower
level, very stable libraries. Libraries that are considered so
fundamental that 1) upgrading to a more recent version is
considered a major undertaking, much like moving to a new
version of the compiler and 2) if you do it, you recompile
everything and run the entire regression test suite again,
before going further.
--
James Kanze (Gabi Software) email: james.kanze@gmail.com
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