Re: [9fans] plan or side effect

["AMSRL-CI-C" <gwyn@arl.army.mil>]

> Function calls are cheap.  They used to be expensive, but they're
> really not any more.

Of course that depends on the architecture.  I'm really pleased
with Motorola's M*CORE, where quite often no registers at all
need to be saved across the function call (except the return PC
which is automatically pushed on the stack).

> you'd have to have a pretty special program before this change could
> make a worthwhile improvement.

It is also possible, sometimes, to change the algorithm, e.g.
hashing has more up-front cost but searching is then cheaper.

> Surely inlining is safer than this sort of hack, if you can inline.

Yes, that particular hack was to avoid function linkage, which
is also what inlining does.  The C compilers shipped with the
5620 DMD/630 MTG SGS were very good about automatically
inlining small functions.