What is the cost of a function call?

Question

Compared to

• Simple memory access
• Disk access
• Memory access on another computer(on the same network)
• Disk access on another computer

Answer 1

The cost of a function call depends on the architecture. x86 is considerably slower (a few clocks plus a clock or so per function argument) while 64-bit is much less because most function arguments are passed in registers instead of on the stack.