[fpc-devel] inline... and philosophy

[J. Gareth Moreton]

This message chain has proven to be a lot more educational and 
insightful than I would have given it credit for.  Thanks everybody!

I know a lot of the time, the size of binaries is just an illusion, 
along with unfair comparisons with GCC (a behemoth with corporate 
support) and Microsoft Visual C++ that often hides the size of binaries 
behind a redistributable library.  I don't ever seek to make binaries 
smaller at the expense of speed, but if I see a potential saving that 
could be done automatically, I dive for it!

On 10/11/2019 14:47, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> (and btw, if you are serious about these scenarios, drop all 
> optimization work immediately, and start working on packages :-)

I did try to start simple with the 'uComplex' unit, but concerns were 
raised because I changed the formal parameters to 'const' and aligned 
the complex type on x86-64 platforms so it can take advantage of XMM 
registers better (which, given proper optimisation, would result in both 
smaller code size and higher speed).  While I made sure that the 
interfaces would not change for Pascal code, assembler code that calls 
the functions (if it exists) might need to be changed slightly 
(something Florian raised).  I'm not quite sure what the rules are when 
it comes fo updating packages, other than the obvious one of not 
breaking old code.

I like working on optimisation because I have a morbid fascination with 
the lowest level of the CPU and I feel well-suited for it, although 
there are still some things I'm learning about it.

Gareth aka. Kit