Why is inlining considered faster than a function call?

Question

Now, I know it\'s because there\'s not the overhead of calling a function, but is the overhead of calling a function really that heavy (and worth the bloat of having it inli

Answer 1

A typical example of where it makes a big difference is in std::sort which is O(N log N) on its comparison function.

Try creating a vector of a large size and call std::sort first with an inline function and second with a non-inlined function and measure the performance.

This, by the way, is where sort in C++ is faster than qsort in C, which requires a function pointer.