What does 'inline' mean?

[Stanislav Blinov]

On Tuesday, 9 June 2020 at 00:36:18 UTC, Manu wrote:

> What's funny is, in most cases, whether the function is 
> ACTUALLY inlined is
> not really interesting in 2020.
> What inline allows is control over the binary environment as I 
> describe. I
> read it these days as "inline to the calling CU" rather than 
> "inline to the
> calling function".
>
> There are cases where inline is really important, and I do want 
> an error if it fails; for instance, if you have a leaf function 
> (does not allocate any stack memory), it's only possible to 
> make calls from that function where the callee is inlined... 
> and if inlining fails, your caller will lose its no-stack-frame 
> requirement. I've had this come up numerous times, and in those 
> cases, a really-strong-does-make-compile-error inline would be 
> useful, but C++ doesn't have anything like that.

Maybe it's a case where a clear disambiguation is in order? E.g. 
make a new

pragma(local);

...which would instruct the compiler to do what you're 
describing. Or, perhaps, expand the range of options for the 
existing pragma(inline), from the current bool to an enum of 
behaviors.