[LLVMdev] Inlining

[Dustin Laurence]

On 01/09/2010 10:00 AM, Samuel Crow wrote:
> 
> Always inline is the closest to a preprocessor macro you can get in
> LLVM Assembly since it doesn't have a preprocessor at all.

Mine does. :-)

> ...LLVM does
> aggressive inlining for functions used only once so those instances
> don't require specification as alwaysinline.

What I'm trying to do is understand the practical use cases.  Concrete
example: I have some little type accessor and conversion functions that
are typically two or three instructions long because all they really do
is manipulate tag data in the low-order bits of pointers.  (I'm not
exactly innovative, am I?)  While small, they are called all over the
place for boxing and unboxing language-level objects.  In C they would
be explicitly inline.  What is the LLVM equivalent?

My guess is the optimizer will always inline such tiny functions no
matter what as it's probably both a space and a time win, so maybe I
need a different example.  Suppose they were typically five, or ten, or
twenty, or forty instructions long?  Who is responsible for deciding on
the advisability of inlining?  The front-end (which in this case is
actually me?)?  That would be the equivalent of the C99/C++ 'inline'
compiler hint.  Or in LLVM is it better not to give manual compiler
hints about inlining in most cases and let the optimizers decide?

I suppose it's a fuzzy question because I'm fishing for intended usage,
not just semantics.

Dustin