> Yes, it should get inlined, but I've seen this fail in a recent-ish GCC (4.6 to 4.8 or so)
Seems like a pretty bad GCC bug then, one that should be fixed upstream.
I really dislike it when code avoids functions because of fear that they won't be inlined (or to try to work around compiler bugs to that effect), because doing this dramatically reduces code maintainability and safety in exchange for very little benefit, given the inline hint keyword and __attribute__((always_inline)).
GCC's inlining has been a bit brittle, especially when dealing with vector arguments, and also depending on the ABI (4x double vectors without AVX, etc). It's much better in GCC 5.x now.
I generally use always_inline for vector arithmetic functions, just to be sure. You never want to have a function call to do just a few SIMD instructions.
Seems like a pretty bad GCC bug then, one that should be fixed upstream.
I really dislike it when code avoids functions because of fear that they won't be inlined (or to try to work around compiler bugs to that effect), because doing this dramatically reduces code maintainability and safety in exchange for very little benefit, given the inline hint keyword and __attribute__((always_inline)).