Topic summary
Inlining
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Inline expansion.
Inlining is an important optimization, but has complex effects on performance. As a rule of thumb, some inlining will improve speed at very minor cost of space, but excess inlining will hurt speed, due to inlined code consuming too much of the instruction cache, and also cost significant space. A survey of the modest academic literature on inlining from the 1980s and 1990s is given in Peyton Jones & Marlow 1999.