Question

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When should I write the keyword 'inline' for a function/method?

I am not 100% sure, but as far as I know, if I declare a function on an hpp file with the body it will be treated as it is marked as inline(the compiler will decide what to do), I mean:

//myfile.hpp
class StackOverflow{
public:
    void overflow(){_overflow = true;}
...
}

would be the same than:

//myfile.hpp
class StackOverflow{
public:
    ***inline*** void overflow(){_overflow = true;}
...
}

If I am wrong then the question is over, but otherwise, I really like to mark as inline a function even it is not necessary, does general code style guidelines say soemthing about it?

Thanks so much

Answer 1

As the mention of the keyword inline in this context gives no information whatsoever, leave it out. It’s simply visual clutter.

If there were an option to make an inline-defined function non-inline, this would be a different matter (consider private-by-default as such an example): here, it could be argued that even though it’s the default, making the choice explicit makes it easier to understand. But there’s no choice here. No matter what you do, a member function defined inside the body of a class is inline.

In fact, marking it explicitly as inline would be akin to providing other inferred information. You wouldn’t write the following, would you?

#define member
#define function

class StackOverflow{
public:
    member function inline void overflow() { _overflow = true; }
}