Question

GCC 4.6.1, specifically.

I am aware that CPP files serve to separate interface from implementation; that’s not of interest right now.

Looking at this, I don’t see any reason not to use only headers and all functions inline.

Performance is a concern, but I don’t see that such an approach could make things slower. What I don’t want, is to have critical sections which would usually be inlined, become slower because everything is inline. If that makes sense.

Answer 1

Here are some reasons not to:

• No encapsulation; “internal” methods are visible to the entire program.
• Namespace pollution (leading to naming clashes or programmer error)
• Dependency problems; it becomes much harder to ensure everything’s declared in the right order.
• Increased compilation times