Inline function v. Macro in C — What's the Overhead (Memory/Speed)?

Question

I searched Stack Overflow for the pros/cons of function-like macros v. inline functions.

I found the following discussion: Pros and Cons of Different macro function

Answer 1

as others have said, it mostly depends on the compiler.

I bet "pow" costs you more than any inlining or macro will save you :)

I think its cleaner if its an inline function rather than a macro.

caching and pipelining are really where you are gonna get good gains if you are running this on a modern processor. ie. remove branching statements like 'if' make enormous differences ( can be done by a number of tricks )

Answer 2

Calling an inline function may or may not generate a function call, which typically incurs a very small amount of overhead. The exact situations under which an inline function actually gets inlined vary depending on the compiler; most make a good-faith effort to inline small functions (at least when optimization is enabled), but there is no requirement that they do so (C99, §6.7.4):

Making a function an inline function suggests that calls to the function be as fast as possible. The extent to which such suggestions are effective is implementation-defined.

A macro is less likely to incur such overhead (though again, there is little to prevent a compiler from somehow doing something; the standard doesn't define what machine code programs must expand to, only the observable behavior of a compiled program).

Use whatever is cleaner. Profile. If it matters, do something different.

Also, what fizzer said; calls to pow (and division) are both typically more expensive than function-call overhead. Minimizing those is a good start:

double ratio = SigmaSquared/RadialDistanceSquared;
double AttractiveTerm = ratio*ratio*ratio;
EnergyContribution += 4 * Epsilon * AttractiveTerm * (AttractiveTerm - 1.0);

Is EnergyContribution made up only of terms that look like this? If so, pull the 4 * Epsilon out, and save two multiplies per iteration:

double ratio = SigmaSquared/RadialDistanceSquared;
double AttractiveTerm = ratio*ratio*ratio;
EnergyContribution += AttractiveTerm * (AttractiveTerm - 1.0);
// later, once you've done all of those terms...
EnergyContribution *= 4 * Epsilon;

Answer 3

Please review the CERT Secure coding standard talking about macros and inline functions in terms of security and bug arousing , i do not encourage using function-like macros , because : - Less Profiling - Less Traceable - Harder to debug - Could Lead to severe Bugs