John Colvin:
Another use case is to aid propogation of compile-time information for optimisation. A function might look like a poor candidate for inlining for other reasons, but if there's a statically known (to the caller) integer parameter coming in that will be used to decide a loop length, inlining allows that info to be propogated to the callee. Static loop lengths => well optimised loops, with opportunities for optimal unrolling. Even with quite a large function this can be a good choice to inline.
If the function is private in a module, and it's called only from one point (or otherwise the loop count is the same in different calls), I think this optimization can be performed even if the function is not inlined.
Bye, bearophile
