--inline

[bearophile]

Russel Winder:

> I am getting hints that using --inline in some small (well 
> trivial
> really) compute intensive codes actually makes performance 
> worse by a
> few percent.  Nothing experimental / statistically significant, 
> just
> some anecdotal observations. Is this as it might be expected or 
> is it
> something that needs more investigation?

Inlining (like most other things in life) is a matter of 
tradeoffs. Inlining removes the costs of function calls, allows 
some more small local optimizations, and increases code locality 
in the code cache, but it also increases code size and this 
sometimes increases cache misses. Finding the right amount of 
inlining to use is hard. The inliner works heuristically (and 
often only on the base of information known statically, unless 
you are using a JIT or profile-driven optimization) to balance 
such tradeoffs, trying to find something good enough on average. 
But sometimes its choice is suboptimal.

GCC offers user-written compiler hints to forbid the inlining of 
a specific function, or to almost-force the inlining of the 
function.

Bye,
bearophile