Inlining in GCC, code style/ design and Linux disassembler recommendations

[Piotr Tarsa]

1. First problem is that I want to mark functions to be inlined. My project consists of one .c file and few .h files, all of which are included (in)directly from that .c file. If I mark some function inline but not static then GCC's ld shows error "undefined reference". What does marking functions static do? Why I can't mark functions to be inlined in the same compilation unit?

2. I've posted the zipped NetBeans project I've talked about above containing small framework for range coder based compressors. Feel free (or: I encourage you ; ) to make some comments about it.

3. Please list your recommendations of Linux disassemblers which make a good use of debugging information (so I'll see original variable names in disassembled code).

[Matt Mahoney]

A static function means that the name is not exported, so you can't link to it from other files. Obviously if you link to a function, it's not inlined. If you want to inline a function, then declare it in the same file or a header file.

[Piotr Tarsa]

Well, as I said, there's only one .c file and few .h files. That produces single object file. I can't understand why GCC doesn't see inlined functions in such simple scenario.

[Shelwien]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6...-useful-in-c99

Also, with modern compilers only noinline directives seem to make any sense.
Well, and also #define macros, because somehow even forceinline is frequently worse than a macro.

> Linux disassemblers

I don't use linux, but it'd be interesting if you could test http://out5.hex-rays.com/files/idademo_linux62.tgz
Also, how about gcc -S ?

[Piotr Tarsa]

Inline static methods and objdump do the job. Thanks for suggestions.

[Shelwien]

Well, I tried to suggest INLINE/NOINLINE from

#ifdef __GNUC__
 #define INLINE   __attribute__((always_inline)) 
 #define NOINLINE __attribute__((noinline))
 #define ALIGN(n) __attribute__((aligned(n)))
#else
 #define INLINE   __declspec(forceinline)
 #define NOINLINE __declspec(noinline)
 #define ALIGN(n) __declspec(align(n))
#endif

Simple "inline" isn't guaranteed to inline anything, and the attribute might not have these side effects.

In practice NOINLINE is the useful one, though, because at -O3 the compiler usually inlines all the functions
anyway.