Question

I have a section of my program that contains a large amount of math with some rather long equations. Its long and unsightly and I wish to replace it with a function. However, chunk of code is used an extreme number of times in my code and also requires a lot of variables to be initialized.

If I’m worried about speed, is the cost of calling the function and initializing the variables negligible here or should i stick to directly coding it in each time?

Thanks,

-Faken

Answer 1

Most compilers are smart about inlining reasonably small functions to avoid the overhead of a function call. For functions big enough that the compiler won’t inline them, the overhead for the call is probably a very small fraction of the total execution time.

Check your compiler documentation to understand it’s specific approach. Some older compilers required or could benefit from hints that a function is a candidate for inlining.

Either way, stick with functions and keep your code clean.