Re: Bloat

[Allen Briggs <briggs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 11:26:08AM +0900, Masao Uebayashi wrote:
> I've considered this.  We're really need to move toward modular and
> stable ABI.  OTOH we may need tricks to run programs faster on slow
> computers (older computers, embedded low-power processors, etc.).
> It'd be a good compromisation to make important APIs  a function by
> default, while preparing a way to make them "optimized" for speed
> (inline, less indirection, etc.).  In the "optimized" case, ABI is not
> kept.  So users can choose either ABI or speed.

And it's not quite that simple and straightforward in some ways.
For vax (I think) inline makes a lot of sense because there's a
significant function call overhead.  For ARM (and others?), inlining
can be bad in some cases because it increases the code size, which
can increase the memory footprint of the code and the number of
instruction cache misses.  In that case, functions (and non-unrolled
loops) *can* actually be better.

-allen

-- 
Allen Briggs  |  http://www.ninthwonder.com/~briggs/  |  
briggs%ninthwonder.com@localhost