Re: Use pragma INLINE or not?

[firth@sei.cmu.edu (Robert Firth)]

In article <1991Jun19.234429.20796@netcom.COM> jls@netcom.COM (Jim Showalter) writes:

>Let the compiler inline when it can figure it out. Use a profiler
>to find bottlenecks when tuning the code, and manually inline the
>offenders. DON'T inline everything to "be sure"--this has a bunch
>of bad effects, and is completely unecessary (10% of your code uses
>90% of your CPU).

Ah, how true!  I remember writing my very first execution profiler,
for a machine that didn't have one.  To test it, I profiled a pretty
substantial program that I'd writen myself, maintained for a few
years, and with which I believed myself reasonably - nay, intimitely
- familiar.

Well, before profiling, I marked my guess at the top few time
sinks - obvious things such as the chain of 6 nested procedure
calls it took to emit one byte of output data.

All my guesses together accounted for 6% of the time. The number
one time sink was a search loop that I'd stupidly written the wrong
way round - the item being looked for was usually near the end of
the list rather than near the beginning.  Who would have believed
that mattered for a list of maximum length 18?  I reversed the
search and saved almost 20% of the time.