C Inline Functions and Memory Use

Question

If I use inline functions, does the memory usage increase?

Answer 1

There is another point you have to consider:

Using inline functions, the compiler is able to see where variables of the caller are going to be used as variables in the callee. The compiler can optimize out (often this is really many assembler lines that can be omitted. look out for the so called "aliasing problem") redundant code based on that knowledge. So your "code bloat" is often not all that big, especially if you have smaller functions it can even reduce bloat as Jim stated above.

Someone made a good point: Better make the compiler decide whether it inlines the function in question or not, since it knows the code it generates better than you ever would.

Answer 2

Depends on the function. Simple one-liners could have a memory reduction since no callstack needs to be setup and cleaned and no function call is made. If the function is larger than this overhead needed to call a function, then it will of course bloat the code.